Iingly, the solution to the tension problem also solved a problem with cable corrosion. As the cable would go in and out of tension, the zinc coating could more easily get worn away, making the galvanization less useful in my small scale test. After I ged my testing system and monitored it over the month, I found that a more sistent tension in the cable prevented wear and tear, and reduced corrosion.

  This month was full of all kinds of iing discoveries beyond that though. Shortly after returning from growing the mana crystal, Tiberius had an update on one kind of fluorite. He'd beeing all kinds of materials doped into the crystal growth, but most didn't have an effebsp; Based on the various anid inanipounds he tested, it seems like the first two rows of elements don't seem to have any appreciable effects. Most of his testing was focused around trying all kinds anipounds, which, irospect, I probably should have warned him about. I find myself frequently mistaking his iy for haviain knowledge. It's fairly obvious to me that putting any anipound into molten rock is basically going to break the majority of the bonds in it, redug it to a soup of elements.

  He did, however, seem to eventually cat that it didn't really matter what the anic material was, it pretty much had no effebsp; He did discover a very iing property of lead doped fluorite. In our initial tests, it had seemed to have no properties. However, we weren't testing for the property that it seems to exert. Tiberius cimed that the property is increased weight based on his observations. During o, the string suspending the crystal snapped. Intrigued, he tried other thin strings, and they also snapped.

  After doing some other measurements using a bance, he thinks it's just heavier. However, I'm not sure of that myself, based oests he described doing. I've instructed him to test moving crystals to see if they're also harder to move horizontally, even while not experieng fri. Based on his existis, they could have three different properties. They could be affected mreatly by gravity, have a downward force applied, or have more mass.

  At the very least, it should be easy to determine if they have more mass somehow while exposed to mana. If it's not that, I don't know if we have the capability to determine if they're affected by gravity more, or if they have a ft downward force applied to them. We'd o have access to varied gravitational fields for that to be done. Personally, I'm hoping that they have increased mass, sihat would be the most exg property of the three.

  The team that was expanding the tuhrough the mountain finally reached the middle as well. I ended up spending a few days making a very rge mana poison taio let us move the medium sized crystal out of the tunnel on this side, to improve the speed they mine from that side. Since we desighe tuo drain water, it's actually draining quite a bit. It's many miles long, and it's draining about 80 gallons per minute, which is quite a lot of water. However, I don't expect it to stay that high forever. As the water pressure in the rocks slowly decreases, it should reach a eady state somewhere lower than the current amount after a few years.

  When all was said and done, I barely did any stru work for the cableway, which meaing it pleted this year is starting to seem more and more like a pipe dream. Though I did at least get a rough estimate for how deep I'll o make the terweight pit. I triple checked my math, and it seems like it'll o be about 100 feet deep, based on how much was necessary in my smaller system. With a pit that deep, it'll take some time for it to get dug out, even with a stru team's help.

  The terweight will o be quite rge as well. If it's made out of sto'll end up being a cube just over 7 feet per side. Which is not a miniscule amount. What I'll probably end up needing to do is cut the cube from the bottom of the pit, and attach support cabling up to the tensioner pulley, and then use a lot of leverage to get it up to position in the system.

  I decided to accept that the cableway wouldn't be able to be pleted in a single year, which, when I phrase it that way, should have been obvious. I've focused the efforts at the end of this year oing the terweight pit dug alongside a stru team. I also took a much more proper estimate of how far the cableway will be traveling by using stakes and rope along where I'll put the pylons, and it's a lot less than I had thought. It's only about three miles long, rather than the five I was using to estimate before.

  That shrunk the terweight size from just over 7 feet down to just under 6 feet to a side, and the pit only o be about 60 feet deep, rather than 100. When you add it all up, sidering I want three feet of clearan either side of the terweight, that means we o excavate less than half the inal amount of proposed material. Before we were going to have to cut about 1600 tons of roow that number is close to 700 tons.

  Despite these savings, it was still worth it to build a small e for lifting sto of the pit. Thanks to the fact we were using a e, we were able to cut rger blocks out, speeding up the excavation process. Unfortunately, it does mean I'll have to cut the blocks down to a more manageable size when I want to use them iure. While we'd wait for our mana to recharge, we'd either work oing the pathrepared for the pylons down the mountain, or clear the path back to the cave.

  The pit was pleted about half a month before winter set in on the mountain. I kept the stru team around for ara day to build a basic building over the pit so that the snow wouldn't fill the pit and make w on it a nightmare year. With argon produ at our current rate, I think it'll be about six more years until I've grown a mana crystal to be a bit bigger than ParTor. Unfortunately, to get it to that point, I will wo more crystal groaratuses, each rger and more plicated than the previous ones.

  By these two stages, the crystal will be se that it'll be easier to simply break the bottom of the apparatus out and repair it, rather than try to e up with a plicated meism for easily removing the crystal. It'll sit in each apparatus for a few years anyway, so that would further plicate any removal meism.

  Though I should also sider whether I should simply remake the mana crystal groaratuses down at the facility instead. The cableway would still be useful if I did, since I'd o move all the tainers of the spent crystal material back down the mountain, alongside the current in-progress crystal. There are other reasons beyond that for this cableway as well.

  The altitude that the cave is at also happens to be the altitude that mana poison pnts grow. It's also approximately the altitude where we have our handful of military osts for looking out over the o, si's generally still below the cloud level. Plus, I'd rather our first rgescale cableway not be frequently used. I'm sure I'll find all sorts of problems that we'll o resolve with this cableway, meaning it'll be quite unreliable. I'd rather this one fail, rather than one hauling a gondo full of goblins up a hillside.

  With all these projects taking so long, I keep falling further and further behind fluorite produ, and I think it might be worth thinking about simple uses for some of the fluorite types. Otherwise, we'll end up with thousands of heat ptes without any use for them.