Interestingly, the solution to the tension problem also solved a problem with cable corrosion. As the cable would go in and out of tension, the zinc coating could more easily get worn away, making the galvanization less useful in my small scale test. After I changed my testing system and monitored it over the next month, I found that a more consistent tension in the cable prevented wear and tear, and reduced corrosion.
This month was full of all kinds of interesting discoveries beyond that though. Shortly after returning from growing the mana crystal, Tiberius had an update on one kind of fluorite. He'd been testing all kinds of materials doped into the crystal growth, but most didn't have an effect. Based on the various organic and inorganic compounds he tested, it seems like the first two rows of elements don't seem to have any appreciable effects. Most of his testing was focused around trying all kinds of organic compounds, which, in retrospect, I probably should have warned him about. I find myself frequently mistaking his ingenuity for having certain knowledge. It's fairly obvious to me that putting any organic compound into molten rock is basically going to break the majority of the bonds in it, reducing it to a soup of elements.
He did, however, seem to eventually catch on that it didn't really matter what the organic material was, it pretty much had no effect. He did discover a very interesting property of lead doped fluorite. In our initial tests, it had seemed to have no properties. However, we weren't testing for the property that it seems to exert. Tiberius as claimed that the property is increased weight based on his observations. During one test, the string suspending the crystal snapped. Intrigued, he tried other thin strings, and they also snapped.
After doing some other measurements using a balance, he thinks it's just heavier. However, I'm not sure of that myself, based on the tests he described doing. I've instructed him to test moving crystals to see if they're also harder to move horizontally, even while not experiencing friction. Based on his existing tests, they could have three different properties. They could be affected more greatly by gravity, have a downward force applied, or have more mass.
At the very least, it should be easy to determine if they have more mass somehow while exposed to mana. If it's not that, I don't know if we have the capability to determine if they're affected by gravity more, or if they have a flat downward force applied to them. We'd need to have access to varied gravitational fields for that to be done. Personally, I'm hoping that they have increased mass, since that would be the most exciting property of the three.
The team that was expanding the tunnel through the mountain finally reached the middle as well. I ended up spending a few days making a very large mana poison container to let us move the medium sized crystal out of the tunnel on this side, to improve the speed they mine from that side. Since we designed the tunnel to drain water, it's actually draining quite a bit. It's many miles long, and it's draining about 80 gallons per minute, which is quite a lot of water. However, I don't expect it to stay that high forever. As the water pressure in the rocks slowly decreases, it should reach a new steady state somewhere lower than the current amount after a few years.
When all was said and done, I barely did any construction work for the cableway, which means getting it completed this year is starting to seem more and more like a pipe dream. Though I did at least get a rough estimate for how deep I'll need to make the counterweight pit. I triple checked my math, and it seems like it'll need to be about 100 feet deep, based on how much was necessary in my smaller system. With a pit that deep, it'll take some time for it to get dug out, even with a construction team's help.
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The counterweight will need to be quite large as well. If it's made out of stone, it'll end up being a cube just over 7 feet per side. Which is not a miniscule amount. What I'll probably end up needing to do is cut the cube from the bottom of the pit, and attach support cabling up to the tensioner pulley, and then use a lot of leverage to get it up to position in the system.
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I decided to accept that the cableway wouldn't be able to be completed in a single year, which, when I phrase it that way, should have been obvious. I've focused the efforts at the end of this year on getting the counterweight pit dug alongside a construction team. I also took a much more proper estimate of how far the cableway will be traveling by using stakes and rope along where I'll put the pylons, and it's a lot less than I had thought. It's only about three miles long, rather than the five I was using to estimate before.
That shrunk the counterweight size from just over 7 feet down to just under 6 feet to a side, and the pit only needs to be about 60 feet deep, rather than 100. When you add it all up, considering I want three feet of clearance on either side of the counterweight, that means we need to excavate less than half the original amount of proposed material. Before we were going to have to cut about 1600 tons of rock, now that number is close to 700 tons.
Despite these savings, it was still worth it to build a small crane for lifting stone out of the pit. Thanks to the fact we were using a crane, we were able to cut larger blocks out, speeding up the excavation process. Unfortunately, it does mean I'll have to cut the blocks down to a more manageable size when I want to use them in the future. While we'd wait for out mana to recharge, we'd either work on getting the pathway prepared for the pylons down the mountain, or clear the path back to the cave.
The pit was completed about half a month before winter set in on the mountain. I kept the construction team around for an extra day to build a basic building over the pit so that the snow wouldn't fill the pit and make working on it a nightmare next year. With argon production at our current rate, I think it'll be about six more years until I've grown a mana crystal to be a bit bigger than ParTor. Unfortunately, to get it to that point, I will need two more crystal growth apparatuses, each larger and more complicated than the previous ones.
By these two stages, the crystal will be so large that it'll be easier to simply break the bottom of the apparatus out and repair it, rather than try to come up with a complicated mechanism for easily removing the crystal. It'll sit in each apparatus for a few years anyway, so that would further complicate any removal mechanism.
Though I should also consider whether I should simply remake the mana crystal growth apparatuses down at the facility instead. The cableway would still be useful if I did, since I'd need to move all the containers of the spent crystal material back down the mountain, alongside the current in-progress crystal. There are other reasons beyond that for this cableway as well.
The altitude that the cave is at also happens to be the altitude that mana poison plants grow. It's also approximately the altitude where we have our handful of military watchposts for looking out over the ocean, since it's generally still below the cloud level. Plus, I'd rather our first largescale cableway not be frequently used. I'm sure I'll find all sorts of problems that we'll need to resolve with this cableway, meaning it'll be quite unreliable. I'd rather this one fail, rather than one hauling a gondola full of goblins up a hillside.
With all these projects taking so long, I keep falling further and further behind fluorite production, and I think it might be worth thinking about simple uses for some of the fluorite types. Otherwise, we'll end up with thousands of heat plates without any use for them.