Fixing the two crystal growing apparatuses took a few days, but I ended up spending een days on the mountain modifying all the other apparatuses to also allow for use of aernal gas sourbsp; I also took iory of all the crystal waste material we have on hand. It's about 600 cubic feet of the waste material, which would also be cutting it close frowing a crystal about the size of ParTor. If I factor in that I'd likely be starting from a crystal that is already two-feet tall, and that we do have other mana crystal material, then we should have enough material, once we get the argon for the project.

  That said, the argon isn't going to be made very quickly. In order to make more liquid air, we'd need an even rger produ area for it. The dam just doesn't really have enough avaible power to do so, and wind power won't cut it. In theory I could build multiple smaller facilities along the stream using water wheels, and then transport the liquid air to the distiltion n, but that would produce so little liquid air pared to the resources used that it's probably not worth it.

  I have thought about the idea of using fluorite crystals to produce heat to boil water to drive maes, or used directly in a stirling engine as the heat sourbsp; In theory, that could work, but it does e with a few engineering problems of it's own. While individual crystals produce a det amount of heat, the bigger the area of crystals the less effective they are at actually verting mana to heat.

  I theorize that the mana has issues peing into a pile of crystals before potentially beied outward. So while four crystals might, in theory, produce 50 watts of energy in the form of heat, sixteen crystals in a simir area may only produce 100 watts. While there is still a increase i, there are signifit losses of effibsp; A single crystal with the mass of the four inal crystals, by parison, might produce 100 watts on it's own. These numbers are, obviously, but they're observation based heuristics, using the research I did on the fluorite crystals before.

  Now, there are a few solutions to that problem. Oential solution is to simply gre enough singur crystals that they boil water without overheating themselves to the point of melting. If I grow the crystals deep underground, I could grow them obsely rge, then cut slices out of them, so they have very rge surface area, while still maintaining a fairly rge volume. Depending oual amount of heat they produce, I could space these sources out and biheir steam lio power a rge steam engine. A turbine would be better in pce of a steam engine, but without stainless steel, a turbine would likely be too high maintenand the design would be much more plicated.

  A sed solution, and my own preferred option, would be to simply install a rge mana crystal upstream of the water i, providing a mana rich water as the source thus increasing the output of the individual crystals. The issue with this, obviously, is that it puts the cart before the horse. We currently are trying to make a rge enough crystal to put on the surface again, so we definitely don't have a spare to use on this.

  A sed problem with this potential process that I fear might happen is something I'm going to call mana stripping. We already noticeably felt the loss of mana ier when the crystals that had been submerged in our stream broke. If I thehat same stream to boil water with fluorite crystals, I have a feeling it'd e the remaining mana iream, leaving none for anything downstream. Never mind the fact that we'd want to use a deo recover the water we boiled.

  If, instead, I tried to go with a stirling engine design, I'd run into multiple problems. First, stirling engines actually are fairly low power, and e cryocooler actually does require a det amount of horsepower to work. Sed, these peing stirling engines would basically o be run with air as their operating fluid, rather than hydrogen. The hydrogen engines, while much more effit, require more maintenand a stant supply of hydrogen. We only have a small supply of hydrogen, so it would be impractical to use it here.

  There are many design challenges involved in making these stirling engines as well. I'd basically o design a standard crystal cut, like I did with quartz, so that I could easily make stirling ehat could have said crystals embedded i side of the engine. Figuring out how to grow fluorite, aermining what inclusions produce what effects would potentially let us produce hydrogen on a rger scale, as well as allow us to make detly sized crystal ptes to use for produg heat.

  After thinking through all those possibilities, I'm really ined to try to resume fluorite crystal growth researbsp; It seems like a real tender as a magic shortcut to sparking an industrial revolution, since we'd expoially increase our avaible energy to drive maes. If we could get the heat in the fluorite deposit under trol, I'd like to get some other people to start extrag more of it. I suppose I could always check to see if any of the goblins have gained heat resistahough I doubt they'd also have stone shaping.

  While I worked on the new dewar fsks and stirling engines for the cryogenics facility, I checked in with our records, and while we do have goblins with heat resistanone have stone shaping. They're really quite different groups if I think about it. The goblins with heat resistance all work around the various furnaces, and they generally only handle already processed ores. At first g'd seem reasoo just use a pressurized air pipe t cooler air from outside into the fluorite mine, but that would introduce a rge amount of mana, just heating the whole area again.

  As I installed the new cryocoolers in the cryogenics facility, I realized that I obviously have a solutiht there. When we pull of liquid nitrogen and liquid oxygen from the top and bottom initially, we remix those cryogenic fluids into a slightly more oxygen rich solution than normal, and transport a few gallons of the mixture to the mine. I'd o make a basin where it could be poured out to evaporate, but I'd suspect that it'd only provide a few hours of reprieve. While it couldn't run all the time, it'd at least let people other tharact the fluorite, plus it's a straightforward use for our byproduct cryogenic fluids that doesn't require much additional work to use.

  As I thought about the stirling engines, I also realized that we could keep subpar crystal clusters of fluorite in the greenhouses for salt evaporation. The extra heat should increase the rate that the water evaporates, making them even more productive. All this will have to wait for year, when our first actual batches enic fluid are made.

  After finishing all the work that I had po do for the cryogenics year, I first checked in on the mine. There were a few ges that had happened si year. First, the exploratory tunnel was tinuing to be extended. They'd run out of crystals to harvest that they could find. With the dwarf who has his own version of teise, I don't eveo be the oo scout for materials. It takes him a bit loo scout all around the tu various points than it takes me, given his sense is in a straight line, and his total mana pool seems quite a bit smaller than mine. Since he works all the time though, it's a few days a year that I don't have to spend, so I'm happy.

  The rge metal ore deposit earlier in the mine is also practically depleted. We actually do have quite the rge stockpile of metals backed up now thanks to this deposit, so I'm hoping it will st us at least until we find another deposit. After discussing with Zeb about our stone demands, it seems like we're still operating with quite an excess of stone for stru.

  So, I decided to ge how we're operating in the mine as we build the tunnel. Rather than transport stone all the way out of the mine, some of the stone is being used to fill in the rge mined out area. We're taking a small amount of the nicely cut stone, and using that to make support pilrs at frequent intervals i mine. Then the space between the pilrs is being filled in with any loose oddly shaped stone, gravel, and sand made using pulverizers. After four or so feet has been filled in, stone shaping is used to make a foot thick solid yer of stohen the process is repeated.

  Ultimately, the time saved by not having to haul stone all the way out of the tunnel is lost on having to haul it to the bottom of the pit. However, I don't really like the idea of leaving a rge hollow spader the mountain like that. If we had ahquake or simir event, the hollow pit would likely cause catastrophic failure of the nd above it. By filling it ba, at least some of the potential damage will hopefully be mitigated.