After having spent six days mining copper on the mountain, I spent an additional six days transp it back to the city. When I returned I talked with Zeb about the idea of building a harbor on the far side of the isnd. As I suspected, they're busy right now with what we both agree is a more pressing matter of expanding the popution, which will eventually lead ter work force, allowing projects like this to be more easily pleted.

  It has been hat I've no longer been having to manage many aspects of the growing city, but it also has left me feeling somewhat disected from it. I see new housing go up, and many new goblins I've never seen before every time I go to work on a project for aended period of time. Before, I was making a lot of the executive decisions for the daily operation for our city, but now I'm basically only handling fions.

  I shouldn't pin to much though, as handling all the little tasks is a pain I'd rather not have to think about, but maybe I should dedicate a week every year to check up on things, and make sure that the people I left in charge of different aspects of running things are doing a good job.

  For now though, I have a salvage barge e to work on. I've brought back signifitly more copper than I should actually need, with the hope that if I get the barge w, I produce a few spare cable spools for the hobgoblins who will run the salvage ship. If I 't get it w, then we'll just have more spare copper.

  After eight days of smelting copper into thick wire to make into cable, I finally had enough to ruest to lift the on. While I worked on making the cable, I also worked with Karsh on designing a gearbox for operating the dual winches for the e. Ultimately, those gears are one of the most likely failure points for the process, so they're closer to toothed drums than gears per se.

  The first and sed tests with the new cable system were a success. I was able to hoist the on up and suspend it betweewo cables. It also handled me pushing, jostling, aually jumping on it. This was to try to simute the extra force that it might experience while being maneuvered onto the boat.

  The third test, sadly, resulted in a failure of a po. The third test was rotating the e head. The way the e is supposed to operate, it'd pull objects up from the front of the barge, to try to keep the boat as stable as possible. Then, it would rotate and deposit the item in the ter of the hull, keeping the ship generally banced.

  Unfortunately, the e head sheered the overppial to fall free when I attempted to stop the e. This was my fault though, as I purposefully rotated the e faster than it should have been rotated. We'll have to fix and repy of the damaged metal, do some reinf in the failure points, and then make sure that all the goblins who work on the barge to operate it know that the e o be moved very slowly, so that this doesn't happen.

  If the e head had fallen and dropped the on and itself on the boat, in all likelihood, the boat would fail and sink. Which is exactly the opposite of what we want it for.

  After seventeen days of work fixing my mistake, double cheg everything with the e, assembling everything on the ship, then training parties on their roles on the ship, it was time for its first test drive. I had hired the two hobgoblins I ran the initial test with to fun as the recovery team. Given the uuation they'll be under, I've devised a bit of an impromptu diving aid for them.

  Eae has a leather vest that has some things attached. Secured to the top of the vest are two tainers made of lightstone and reinforced with copper, which are under a slight vacuum. I tested them myself at about 100 feet of depth without issue of them breaking or failing. Ultimately, they're flotation aids. Otom of the vest are darkstos which be easily released, and provide extra weight beyond the buoyancy of the floats. The darkstos were very simple to stoneshape, and made a great use for the excess darkstone I get from making lightstone, so I really don't mind if they release the weights and leave them in the sea.

  The sides of the ship have some ropes attached that the divers also tie to themselves. Each vest has a slot for a knife as well, though they're lightstone khey'll cut most rope. The ship also has two thiets for rec onballs. Many of the downed ships likely have lots of unused onballs, so I paid the ropemaker and weaver to make two s capable of hauling quite a few onballs. That should make recovery of onballs using the e quite funal.

  In fact, before we attempt to recover any ons that aren't exposed, I've suggested that the two hobgoblins simply haul onballs out from sunken ships and put them in a for recovery. Rec ons is much riskier for both the ship and the hobgoblins, though I advised that they keep a det amount of the onballs to use for meteor shot ter when they might return to recover the ons at a ter point.

  Overall, the ship is manned by 18 demons. The two diving hobgoblins, two goblins and a hobgoblin who operate the steam engine, one goblin for each paddle wheel, three goblins and two hobgoblins who operate the e and maneuver goods, foblins who help maneuver collected goods as needed, a first mate hobgoblin, and a captain hobgoblin. On this particur voyage, we also have myself on board to observe aeach all the roles to all the parties involved, though I've trained each group for at least a day now on their respective roles.

  Due to the nature of this job, I had to pay all the parties pretty well to make up for both the difficulty and risk the job poses. About half of the ship's crew have water resistance, and those who don't have other things like improved endurance which I think will help them swim to shore if somethio happen.

  We uhe ship five days ago, wheide was at it's highest, and we could roll the ship on logs into the filled artificial tide pool area to float it out to the open water. The first day retty unproductive, as we ran various trials to make sure that everyone knew what they were doing. At the end of the day, we anchored a little ways from the jetty, and the crew used two rowboats which we had attached to either side of the ship to make it to the jetty to sleep for the night.

  The day we brought plenty of food with us to the ship, as the pn was to drive the barge to the far side of the isnd, where it could more safely be kept long term. On that side of the isnd, the sandy bay sees the water retreat a signifit distance each day, so the barge simply make it's way close to shore at high tide, drop it's anchor, and in a few hours, it'll be resting on dry nd, and the tents of the ship be unloaded using the e.

  Though I actually do o do some stru to allow unloading ons that way, if they stick to onballs for a while, I should be able to build what I have in mind. For now, the fort work as a ste area and sleeping quarters for the demons operating the ship. We easily reached the far side of the isnd, though we ended up needing to do some work clearing a proper area to park the barge. There were still many remnants of the battle that was fought here, with spikes driven into the sand of the beach.

  After a day of clearing an area for the barge to properly be anchored at, and a clear pathway to the fort, we were finally ready to do a proper salvage attempt.