The first step to making nitrous oxide was making ammonium nitrate. The straightforward way to do that is to just mix the two materials. However, given they're an acid and base, that rea would likely be too exothermiply mix them. Instead, I went with a method of using a water bath around a reag chamber, and actively cooling the water through a radiator. In the reag chamber, I slowly dripped ammonia into the reag chamber, and when it stopped actively reag on drops, I would occasionally sample the liquid and use solid calcium carbonate as a base to check if it's mostly reacted.

  Ohe rea has pretty mupleted, I evaporated off the water with some heat until I was left with ammonium nitrate salt. A rge issue with the methods I'm using here is that it requires some form of both pulverization and drying for the ammonium nitrate salts. Ammonium nitrate is explosive, and while it's not the most sensitive explosive, it's still dangerous to pulverize a it. There are methods to dry it differently, but taking even more time to develop thht now is out of the question. After we've properly produitrous oxide and are fident that it works on the eagles, I e baake the process safer.

  Getting the exact ratio of our ammonia to our nitric acid took 4 days, and processing the ammonium nitrate took another 2. From there, upsg the produ volume took another 8 days. The process I o work on is the produ of nitrous oxide from the ammonium nitrate. For that, I'm going to make a bst proof area for w, because I'm almost certainly going to be destroying a lot of equipment before I've narrowed down what I need.

  Making nitrous oxide was a lot more difficult than I thought it would be. I'd mentiohe explosive danger of ammonium nitrate, but actually being present in that situation was airely different story. Over the course of 122 days, I basically injured myself every nine or ten days in some kind of explosioed i. All of the injuries were minor, small gss cuts or hot oil sptter on my arms were the majority of the injuries. I'd put up a thick gss shield to protect most of my body, but my hands still o be he rea for me to properly mahings.

  The main issue I ran into was that the rea requires some amount of heat to get started, but it's exothermic, so from then on, it starts produg heat, and running away until the ammonium nitrate would explode. Since I o actually collect the gasses, I was using a water based one-way gas valve, which also meant that when an explosion occurred, the small valve couldn't hahe rapid gas release, and the rea chamber would break.

  Sometimes it broke catastrophically a shrapnel out. Most times, it just broke and spshed i oil, throwing it everywhere. Iher situation, what I found was that I needed a way tute temperature in both dires for this process. Unfortunately, the temperature where the rea actually moves forward also gets dangerously close to the smoke point of the pnt oils we're using.

  On one hand, once I figured that out the number of acts reduced drastically because I could pull away and shield myself the sed I noticed smoke f. Oher hand, it means that we're operating at the upper edge of the oil's workable range, meaning it'll need repced fairly frequently.

  I found that ohe temperature reached about 340F, the heat crystal o be removed. Then, at 360F we o begin actively cooling oil by pumping it through an active cooli pump in the form of a mana engine and a radiator. If the radiator overcooled, the pump would turn off, and the oil temperature could rise again. I had to redesign the rea chamber a few times to better allow heat transfer between the oil and solid ammonium nitrate inside, but eventually I came up with a good design with multiple internal ridges that maximized surface area for heat transfer.

  From there, I once again utilized ground birds as test subjects for the gases. It's unfortunate, but a few of them perished iing over the course of my experiments. However, in the 40 days following my initial experiments, I got quite good at knog the birds out for a few hours by utilizing different amounts of ether, nitrous oxide, and pure oxygen gas. By the end of it, the birds would e out of their ahesia after a few hours, and then within thirty minutes or so began behaving normally again.

  So, I was left with the task of upsg the nitrous oxide produ ter level to actually be able to aodate the sheer size of the eagles. Given the explosive risk involved, I think I'm going to upscale by making multiple small apparatuses, rather than e one. The small apparatus still has a minor failure rate due to the imprecise nature of the trols on it, so building more of them is much safer than trying to upscale and risking massive explosions. Long term, it's something I could sider returning to work on, but for now this is the pn.

  As I sg the produ of nitrous oxide, I had a realization that actually getting the gas where it o be, and making it usable could be a problem. Uhe ground birds which were stationary, the eagles are going to be moved over the course of many hours. As such, some kind of cart apparatus will be necessary for transp the gas mixtures aing their release into some kind of mask to direct the flow into the eagle's lungs.

  That was a bit of a difficult problem. St it was a fairly straightforrocess of making drical ste taihat could be filled by bubbling the gas into the tainer with a rge piston for pression. To seal it, I needed a method that would allow pressure release when I wa. I decided to go with a lead screw plug that could be twisted past a hole that release pressure. It only reseals a few times though before we need a new plug.

  I the with a rger reguting chamber to reduce the harsh pressures involved with releasing pressurized gas. Ultimately, I got some inspiration from Tiberius for how to handle reguting the gas. He reended using fish swim bdders as a pressure regutor. I wouldn't have thought of that, but it's a fairly estic balloon. We'll need a stant supply of fairly rge bdders, sihey'll break dowime, but it's doable. Somewhat disgustingly, he also reereating iines from our barkas and yering those together tas-tight, flexible tubing for the final stretch after the swim bdders. Those be more adequately processed and treated to prevent decay, and we have a steady supply of the iines, whitil now were basically recycled in the mushroom growing areas underground as part of reprocessing waste materials.

  Overall, the final design I came up with was a moderate sized cart that could hold a few tainers of pressurized gas. Those go into a mixing chamber, which thehrough a swim bdder regutor and through a barkas iiil it reaches a leather mask. The leather isn't gas tight, but it should direct most of the gas into the lungs of the eagle, while still letting it exhale to remove waste gasses from it's lungs. The whole design allows the hot sing of tanks of gas so we stantly resupply as we travel, and the cart has both wheels and carrying poles so it be transported through rough terrain as needed.

  We're in the final stretow. I finished with the nitrous oxide produ lines and training some demons to ma after an additional 40 days, and then desighe cart apparatus in another 30. Based on my teise measurements in the crystal groaratus, we're about five months from being doh growing the rge mana crystal. The bathhouse is plete now, and we've build a lot of artificial eagles s. I want to take some time getting the city in the right mi for what's to e now.

  There are a lot of unknowns with installing a crystal this size. On one hand, history seems to show that a crystal this size shouldn't shatter due to a mana storm, which is why we grew it this size. Oher hand, it clearly attracted a lot of eagles to the dwarven capitol. It seemed to drive the leviathans away from our isnd, or at least away from the area between our isnd and the mainnd before, but that was with smaller sized mana crystals. I'm unsure as to what might happen with a rger one. We should experieter crop yields and a higher quality of life from it though, and the artificial tide pools had better yields when we previously had mana crystals, so I'm hoping that tio be the case.

  I think I'm most looking forward to the much higher stru rates that we might find. It's unfortuhat we didn't find any more mana crystal deposits while mining so far. I'll have to gh with teise again to see if they missed any. I don't think we'll stop growing mana crystals when this one finishes, given their usefulness, so it still 't hurt to find more now.