By the time I'd made a second trip up the mountain hauling approximately three gallons of liquid argon, I was determined that I'd have a cableway up the mountain before the end of the year. Part of the reason for this is that the current path from the new facility to the cave is quite long. We follow a road back to the city, then follow the winding path up the mountain, which was designed to keep the gradient fairly low. Ultimately, it takes about seven hours to get from the facility to the cave while hauling a large dewar container.
A slow moving aerial cable lift can probably cut that time to less than two hours. There are downsides to a cable lift though. As I've said before, maintenance will be a large endeavor. Though the amount of work to maintain one lift versus multiple won't be linear. If we install even more lifts in other places, the maintenance burden won't actually be that much higher. The main repair and maintenance would be splicing cable that had been damaged, and that shouldn't happen that often, meaning whoever is trained to do that will also be able to basically handle multiple lifts around the island as part of a single job.
Likewise, once the majority of cable is made, we shouldn't actually need that much spare cable, and the damaged parts can be re-melted and formed back into undamaged cable as needed. I've already started narrowing down design ideas as well with testing. Ultimately, I want to use a single cable size for all our potential cableways, which means for some of them they might be oversized. That being the case, I started testing on the three main types of cableways I'd want on the island.
The first type is designed to haul a single person along with a moderate load of cargo. It looks something like a ski lift, but with a moderately large bucket on the back of the bench for holding transported materials. I decided to go with a solid safety bar on the bench as well, to hopefully prevent accidents. The second type is a passenger gondola, with inside seating, meant to transport four people, as well as a handful of personal items that those riding might bring. The third type isn't suspended at all, but instead would be pulled along rails within the tunnel. Given the much shallower incline involved, and the fact that they aren't suspended, these cable cars can actually be quite a bit larger while using the same size cable, hopefully facilitating the transport of goods and people through the tunnel if we get to that point.
In the last fourty-four days, I've really started to narrow down a lot of the design properties, though I still have some amount of work left to do. Thanks to all the rain, I quickly realized that I'd actually need to update our steel processes for this application. Much of our steel items are covered with some kind of protection, whether it's stone, or they're indoors. However, this will be mostly outdoors, and as such, they're prone to corrosion. We do, however, have a solution for this and I've already tested it to some success, galvanization.
We've had access to zinc for a while now, and it's mostly just been stored away. So, what we're doing now is filling a vat with molten zinc, and then dipping our steel that will be exposed to rain in it. For the wires that make our steel cable, each wire is drawn through the molten zinc using a set of rollers that submerge the steel wire under the zinc as it's slowly pulled through to coat the wiring. Without nickel or chromium, we don't have much of an option to make corrosion resistant steel, so galvanizing it was our next best option.
I've started a few tests designed to see how corrosion resistant these new wires are by comparison. The testing apparatus periodically sprays a small section of cable with water as the cable continuously rotates around a pair of pullies exerting force on it. Ultimately, it's meant to mimic the conditions the cable will be under long term, while exaggerating the amount of water it's exposed to. Regardless of the results of this test, I don't expect too many changes to certain aspects of the system as a whole, so I plan on finalizing the support tower and station designs relatively soon, so construction of those can begin while some of the tests continue.
Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.
----------------------------------------
In the last month, I've started work on various part of the aerial lift from the research facility up the mountain. I'm getting through my leveling requirements for quite a while as part of this, since I need to clear a path where the lift will travel up the mountain, so I've been focusing on cutting trees during daylight hours. At night, I focus on doing more of the design finalization for the stations and bullwheel for the lift.
The effort to build this is probably on par with a road. However, unlike a road, a lot of the labor is centralized and doesn't require stoneshaping to effectively make. The support pylons will still mostly be made of stone, but since they'll be spaced every thousand feet or so and only stand about sixty feet tall, it won't require quite as much work as filling in a road with stone, even including foundation work. Where as the lifts and wire will all be made at a metalworking facility. The lifts will probably be composed of cast parts, and the wire for the cable will be made through extrusion.
At our metalworking area, I've devised a way to feed semi-molten steel into a roller and extruder so that we can make continuous lengths of steel wire, which should vastly improve the quality and amount of cable we can make. These three day breaks to go grow a mana crystal every month are actually getting to be quite annoying, and I'm still a long ways from being able to change my work pattern. I could delay them every so often, but doing so would then require that I also bring other goblins with me hauling more liquid argon. Which would lead to more chances to attract unwanted attention.
Since I'm carrying the large flask, I go through the city to stay on roads all the way up the mountain, while the goblins who help with melting the crystal material take a long detour before joining me on the road. If it's just me carrying something odd, most people just tune out what I'm doing at this point. I'm conspicuous, but I'm always conspicuous, so most people have stopped bothering to try to figure out what I'm up to. Once the lift is done, I'll easily be able to start spreading my trip time out anyway. Plus, this lets me take a little bit of time to start some of the work up there for the lift as well.
The station won't actually be right at the cave, since it'll be travelling a mostly straight path. Instead, it'll probably be about half of a mile from the cave entrance, meaning we'll at least need a decent trail between the two locations. So, while the goblins who are helping me melt material sleep, I've been mapping out a path to where I want the station, and have started on some of the tree cutting up there as well.
----------------------------------------
I ran into a few more issues that I had to solve as I worked on the design for the aerial lift system in this last month between crystal growth sessions. First, as I did load testing on my smaller rig, I realized that I actually need some kind of tensioning system to balance the load on the cable continuously. Thankfully, a little bit of mechanical work was able to solve this issue, though it's going to be a bit trickier to handle it with the large system.
All I needed to do was install a pulley along the line on a rail with a counterweight to keep constant tension on the line. Though there were a few problems that I needed to intermediately solve for that. First, I quickly realized that I needed the pulley wheel to be large. Our cable is about two inches across, and I found that a wheel about nine feet across was necessary to not cause damage to the cable. My test system is also quite small at about 300 feet. In comparison, the length of the full system will be about five miles long, and the tension in the cable will increase with that total length and extra load.
Meaning that not only will my counterweight need to be much bigger, but it'll also need to have a huge pit dug under it so that it can travel that extra distance to make up for the slack involved in managing such a long cable. Which unfortunately means I'm going to have to get a construction team involved. The good news should be that most of that stone from excavation should find use in the support pylons along the way down the mountain.