The salvage team is still busy pulling up all the sunken goods from Rathnd's invasion, so using our single salvage ship for harvesting float vines would be wasting their time. So for the time being, we'll limit ourselves to the float vihat we harvest close to our shores with reasonable road access. While we could build a sed ship, I thought about it for a little while, and decided I'd rather have a safe harbor built before we make any more ships. Our current ship retty damaged i storm, and I'd like for us to not have that issue.
We could also build some smaller rowboats that be dragged on nd to assist in the endeavor. The issue with rowboats, for us at least, is that utilizing them around the craggy edges of the isnd would be fairly difficult. So, while they would improve the speed that we harvest float vihey wouldn't increase our harvestable area by that much, though it is better than nothing, so I'll probably go with that as the pn for the time being. We do have plenty of roofing supplies now, thanks to our trades during the previous two years.
After I build a few rowboats and teae goblins to hahe float vine harvesting, I'll take the time to finally start iigating the crystals I requested from the mert.
I speeen days w with the carpeo teach them how to make these smaller rowboats, and then teag some goblins how to use and safely store them. The rowboats aren't that rge, and be operated by one hobgoblin or twur goblins. They carry a handful of float vines, or potentially fish, if they want to use them for that. Though I'm a little ed about using them for fishing, sidering how dangerous some of the fish be. On nd, you at least run away when you spot a dangerous fish on your line, in the boat, you have to hope it doesn't decide to attack you, even if you cut the line.
That said, I've got foblins w full time on the float vine harvesting in two rowboats. Ohe vines are collected, they're brought to shore and id out to dry for a few days. Ohey've dried, they're burned in tainers for colleg the soda ash afterwards for use in the pyrite refining process.
After I took a few more days to ehat the goblins were harvesting float vines effectively, I started resear the crystals that the mert had delivered. First, I made simple notes about each crystal based on their observable physical properties. The three crystals that I got at once have three slightly different shades of yelle colors. All three have been artificially shaped, which made it much harder to determiheir natural shape. They vary in size, one is a tube shape with a 3" radius and is 5" long, another is a pte shape 1" thid 4" diameter, the st one is a square prism 6" long and 2" on the sides.
They're retively soft materials as well, being scratched by many different rocks that I have. As advertised, when they absorb mana, they heat up, and the more mana I pour in, the hotter they get. Each crystal produced different amounts of heat from each other for the same amount of mana I infused in with teise as well. Ultimately, to try to get more information about the crystals, I broke them into smaller pieces and observed their fracture patterns. The crystals seem to want to break into octahedral crystals. A feature that is more on as a cleavage pattern than a growth pattern, so it's uhey grew in this shape, but not impossible I suppose, sidering the mana crystals grow in octahedrons...
Even after retesting tiny samples of simirly sized crystals, they still dispyed different amounts of heat produ with the same amount of mana. I tried another scratch test, aermihat all three crystals are very likely the same material, despite slightly different colors a produ. It's likely that the crystals each have slightly different amounts of the same inclusion material, which is leading to the different properties. That's more evideny inclusion theory for crystal's produg mana effects.
The st crystal that was delivered just this st winter was quite a different color pared to the other three, a pale green, and the maed effect was quite different from the other three. When this crystal has mana flowing through it, it slowly seeps a highly fmmable gas. It seems that it o be given an exceptionally rge amount of mana to actually produce a fme tinuously though. Despite it's different color, it does seem to be the same base crystal again, with a different impurity.
I took a few days dois with the gas produg crystal, and sidering it's fmmable properties, it does seem to be produg hydrogen gas. I tried infting a fish's bdder using the gas produced by the crystal, and the weight noticeably decreased. A few other tests all but firmed that the gas being produced was hydrogen. I also found that the crystals were insoluble in water, and tried submerging the gas produg crystal under water that was close to one of the mana crystals, which caused it to start bubbling at a rate fast enough that if I forced all the bubbled gas out of a small opening, it could sustain a strong fme tinuously, like a Bunsen burner.
If nothing else, this singur crystal could be useful in the b for that purpose alone. Because of that, I decided not to damage this crystal for research purposes. If I get another like this, then I'll give it a go.
After that, I resumed testing on the heat produg crystals. From what testing I did with heating samples of water, it seems like the crystals bee less effective if they're smaller than a half an in size, and tinue decreasing in productivity the smaller they get. Above that size though, I couldn't determine if they were less effective or not, as I don't have a precision instrument to measure temperature with, and erating off feel alone.
I'd expect though that it isn't a hard cutoff necessarily, but rather a gradual one. Iingly, for specifically teise tests, smaller crystals get hotter for the same dose of mana, but it seems that the total amount of thermal energy is actually lower than the amount produced by rger crystals. I also got simir results from usiernal mana sources, like the sun or a mana crystal. My guess is that some of the mana fails to be utilized as it travels through the crystal, and as the crystal gets smaller, it's less likely that the mana is with any of the inclusions in it. Though that 't be the only factor, because I tested using a bunall crystals in a pile, and it also didn't produce as much as a single rger crystal of simir mass.
Ultimately, something else must also be tributing to the drop off of smaller crystal effects vs rger ones. One problem I've started having is that I don't actually know that much about the specifics of different crystals from earth, so determining the exaposition of these crystals is a bit difficult. I do know that it's not dum or diamond though, sih of those are hard materials. I do miss having easy access to Konkur and his knowledge. I don't even know if these crystals are actually that rare, or if it's just that findiable ohat aren't dangerous is the difficult part.
While I could spend more time taking notes on the physical characteristics of the crystals, I think I'd like to make a new spa the underground b area, where I add in the crystal powered bunsen burner, and start doing some depositioing on the crystals. I'd like to see what sort of behaviors I get from them, and if possible, try to melt some of it down to grow a new crystal. They aren't soluble in water, but they might be soluble in other materials potentially, so I'd also like to try that.