As I tried to think about potential other uses for fluorite, I recalled two important facts that I needed to keep in mind. First, when I installed all the stirling engines at the new cryogenics facility, the local mana level dropped, and required manual movement of air to increase the mana level high enough to prevent issues with the machines. Second, the rate of growth of plants near the city, and the general quality of life for individuals declined when our massive mana crystals broke. Considering those two facts, I'm nervous about adding too many fluorite crystals in non-industrial locations.
One potential item, even though we don't actually need it, would be a mana powered salt evaporator, using heat fluorite and a large brass bowl to boil off the water. If we ever open trade back up, that would be a potential free source of income. I suppose putting fluorite lights at the gates of our city might be a decent idea, though it won't end up using that much fluorite. Something I'm more interested in making would be a lightstone processing facility using copper fluorite, but that also won't use much fluorite, and will take longer to make and design than the fluorite it will actually consume.
In other words, I don't know that we actually have a good use for all this fluorite. Though the second we end up needing a lot of it, I'll be glad if we've stockpiled it given it's long turn around time. None-the-less it feels like a waste just having all of it sitting around, especially the smaller plates that we have hundreds of. Perhaps I should just give a handful out to some of the goblins in town, and see if any of them come up with interesting uses for them.
I myself plan on spending the winter working on what I can for the cableway, while also digging out a new area deep underground for mana crystal growth chambers. I want to keep it relatively secretive as well, so I think I'll dig it out off of the temporary storage room most of the way down to the fluorite area. Very little fluorite is stored there anymore, though we do still store the fluorite glass before it's melted down in the room. I'll probably dig to the same depth as the other room. I'm hoping that I'll have the next growth chamber done by the time the current crystal is ready for it, meaning I have about a year.
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I took a dozen of the smallest heat plates to the city, and gave them to a few different goblins working in different industries. Depending on how things go, and what they come up with, I'm more than willing to give out some more, as long as we keep the concentration of the plates to a minimum. If we manage to grow a mana crystal to the size of ParTor, then we can install more plates around, though they might need to be adjusted if the mana concentration is too high, though that'll be a problem for a few years from now.
I myself focused in on what work I could do through winter. The wall around the facility is getting closer to completion, so I'm hoping that during springtime, I'll be able to borrow a construction team to assist me in excavating the mana crystal growth chamber, so until then, I've only been digging out the stairwell down to where I'll eventually work. I've also been taking more time to continue clearing a path up the mountain where the pylons will go for the cableway. I'm leveling at pretty much the same rate as before I evolved. So, despite how many trees I've been cutting down, I haven't gained that many levels really.
Level: 13
HP: 4629/4629
MP: 2251/2251
Traits: Mana Affinity, Earth Manipulation, Improved Dexterity, Heat Resistance, Partial Sleep
Magic: Improved Stone Shaping, Tectonic Sense, Improved Earth Spike, Thermal Hands, Pulverize, Thermal Regulation
Though cutting down all those trees did give me an idea for something that we could use some stirling engines for. Our current milling operations of all kinds use windmills to power them. However, the windmills require quite a bit of maintenance and constant resource input. Between wood, and our ever dwindling waterproofing supplies, I think it might be worth converting them to run on stirling fluorite engines.
In fact, I'd prefer to try to teach a demon with stoneshaping and a long history in construction how some of this mechanical conversion and power works. Before now, our ability to install mechanical devices to power things was so limited that it was relatively fine that I was the one who knew how it all needed to be hooked up. Now though, I've started lining up multiple projects that could use that sort of skill, enough that I'm falling far behind the available production of it.
Besides just flour mill, paper mill, and our charcoal pellet press, we also have the lead ore roasting area that could due with switching from wind to magic power. I'd also consider it reasonable to set up a larger charcoal pellet press and mechanical lumbermill up the mountain closer to our dedicated tree farms that we started setting up many years ago. I've been passing them on my way up the mountain each year, and they're reaching the point where the earliest farms will be ready for cutting soon, so getting a permanent processing facility set up would be a benefit there.
I've got just about ten days left before the new year now, so I'll try to talk to Zeb about pulling at least one senior demon from his construction teams for this purpose. Ideally whoever I choose would end up with their own mini-team of assistants as well.
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Zeb had quite a few stipulations to put on me taking away a senior construction team member alongside a handful of other demons. First, and this was one I think is actually preferable, Zeb would also be coming along to get a gist of the job, and the new mechanics team would report to him since these large stirling engines are being installed in buildings anyway. I agreed to that one readily, though I did also inform him that he'll probably want to start appointing managers for each department at some point as he gets more and more workers, rather than managing all these laborers himself.
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His second stipulation was that this would actually only be part-time work. Rather than split apart an entire construction team, he'd rather just have a whole team join in the process as needed. He agreed that the mechanics portion would take priority for any jobs that come up. His concern is that after the handful of planned buildings get built and retrofit, there won't be any new work for them for months, and he doesn't want their labor to be wasted. I agreed that that was a reasonable requirement as well. Thinking about it another way, on earth construction companies would normally have plumbers, electricians, and hvac guys to do all the specialty work for their construction anyway, so this is a sort of mirroring of that.
His final stipulation was that I stop springing so many surprise, short order requests and changes that have high priority on him. He doesn't mind helping out, and sees the value in what I've been working on, but it's very disruptive and many of the construction teams get quite frustrated when they're suddenly sent all the way up the mountain to dig a large pit. He also said that Zaka and I both are far too imposing to voice their frustrations to directly, even if both of us would be understanding of it. This has only become more true since I turned into a lava demon.
While I couldn't promise that I'd never have surprise construction projects, I agreed that many of them could wait a few months as needed. It'll be somewhat frustrating to have to wait to work on some projects, but I've got enough stockpiled projects myself that I can easily work on a different one while I wait for a construction team to help with the first one.
Speaking of, I figured I should bring up that I was hoping to use the teams building our walls at the research facility this spring for excavating out a new mana crystal area. Zeb rolled his eyes, since it definitely seemed like I wasn't learning my lesson. He'd already planned out what projects they'd go work on after finishing construction of the wall, so I would essentially be pulling them off of planned work to do something else. After a short discussion, I'll be getting one construction team to help me sometime this summer, though I'll have them for a longer period of time so I can get the lab more effectively laid out.
After coming to this agreement, I took Zeb and one of the senior construction teams over to the research facility to first introduce them to the heat crystal powered stirling engines. I decided to split their crash course training into two parts. Theory, then practice. Since I'm the only one who doesn't need to sleep, each day they'd go home, then return the next day to learn more. I also required that they agree to some amount of secrecy. While I won't really be able to hide the stirling engine design from simply being looked at, I can have them agree to not discuss how we make them or how to maintain them.
The first four days were spent teaching them the basic mechanics involved, alongside how the assemble the engine from parts, and replace any worn out parts. I also showed them the sizes of stirling engine we have available, alongside the heat plates. Most of them were pretty quick on the hands on portions, but most of them struggled with understanding the theory behind how engines work. I suppose I shouldn't be that surprised, it's actually a little bit complicated. A windmill is straightforward, wind pushes the blades and turns them. However, the concept of hot air expanding, and how pressure and temperature are linked is multiple steps more complicated. It gets even more complicated when you try to explain how you're harnessing that, and why things like a regenerator help significantly with efficiency.
Ultimately though, the theory portion wasn't really that necessary for the tasks they'll be doing, and I only taught about it while they were already working on each component it was related to. The second half of their crash course ran for the remaining six days in the year, and involved determining what size engine is needed for particular applications. I figured if we worked together on the most complicated mechanical building, the paper mill, it would be the best place to start.
The paper mill has two large windmills powering it, with multiple gearboxes sending the windpower to different machines. The building is a bit of a mechanical nightmare as a result. There were two options for retrofitting it. First, simply replace the two windmills with powerful stirling engines, and leave everything else in place. While that would increase the uptime on the paper mill, it wouldn't resolve much of the other potential problems inside the mill that should be considered for retrofitting.
I didn't describe this to them, but I like to think of the ambient mana as wireless electricity, and these stirling engines as electric motors. Thinking of it that way, each machine should simply have an appropriately sized motor, which would simplify the layout of the building. How I went about describing it to them was that the complicated gearboxes add complexity that requires additional maintenance and repair. So a balance needs to be struck between the maintenance schedules for the engines, gearboxes, and any torque shafts in the building. For this particular building, I'd probably switch to a handful of engines, each dedicated to either a large machine, or one engine to a handful of smaller machines, such that the total amount of maintenance is lower.
I didn't forget to remind them that the engines are designed to have replaceable parts, unlike most of the other mechanical components here. So the stirling engine repairs will be quite simple by comparison. Though after I explained this to them, I pulled Zeb aside and told him that I'd probably want to get a few low level stoneshaping demons in the near future that I could train to be maintenance workers who just go around and do regular maintenance on these engines. He rolled his eyes again, but agreed to send some newbies my way after we're done.