I took eleven days getting the designs id out for the lightstone and salt produ facility for the stru teams to work on. Uhe basalt processing facility, a lot of the structs for this facility are assembling simple pos. There are a few notable exceptions, like the meism to lower the crystal heating ptes away from the boilers, but most of the stru is made of stone, so I have a lot less work I o do to actually make everything.

  As that facility started produ, I took three days to also oversee how the rge opening hole was ing along for the mana crystals. They'd already pleted a couple of the floors, but hadn't actually tested that the floors could opeo allow removing the crystal. So, we tried to opeop yer, and it failed to work. Needless to say, steel and stone weigh a lot, and that hadn't really be sidered to the degree it should have been in the initial design. I'd only really e up with a general idea for how it should work, and the stru team had do's best with that idea.

  So, I've given them a much more detailed pn that should allow this to be opened up more successfully, while also making the whole design somewhat more stable. Rather than two half-moohat pull outward, we'll be going with 16 slices that do the same thing. Additionally each of the slices will have a support beam at the end, which rides along the floor below it. The lowest level floor will then also have the option to remove those support beams after the floor is opened, allowing the crystal to be lifted out. It'll take the stru team some time to try to implement the new design I gave them, but I expect this one should work.

  As both of the previous projects marched forward, I then took a few days to see what solutions Tiberius has e up with for our optimization for lead fluorite rounds. While it seems like he initially started out on the inal path we'd worked together on, he seems to have quickly switched over to a taial research idea.

  We had been trying to dehe quartz shielding and the lead fluorite all into one singur shell. Rather than tinuing to optimize those shells, Tiberius switched over to a new idea. Rather than waste valuable weight on the shells, he wondered if it would be possible to get the firing area to be devoid of mana, simir to the underground bs.

  In practice, however, he'd run into quite a few roadblocks. To make a facility like that, he'd need a lot of different things. Quartz shielding around the buo minimize the amount of maing into the buself, and a sed yer of quartz shielding around the artillery piece to further reduce mana leakage into the chamber. Then, you need a lot of fluorite crystals ing mana inside and outside the buo tinually remove all the mana that leaks into the area. Right now, the option for fluorite crystals to e that mana in a norimental way is limited to lead fluorite itself.

  If you make a bunker in that manner, and you fire the shell out from the bunker, it'll gain mass as it escapes the low mana zone, making more of the overall mass of the projectile useful. Overall, it'd let even smaller sized shells be useful, with the only downside being that you'd need a fairly stationary defensive position, and that the position would be somewhat weaker to enemy attack than a normal bunker, sihe buself forms the mana insution. If a wall were to be punctured by an enemy on or artillery, the lead fluorite shells would bee worse than regur lead shells.

  If we are clever with the design for both shells they could be intergeable iillery piece, so even after the bunker is damaged they could switch to standard shells. It is worth sidering as a funal upgrade to our existing defensive bunkers, though retrofitting them would take a siderable amount of time and effort. The main sideration is how much payoff this could potentially provide. With our current quartz she, her the bunker nor shell design is possible. There is an argument to be made about quartz savings over time with a perma deferucture. In practice though, I think I'd prefer both options. The portable shells are obviously useful in any sort of mobile unit, whether that be pulled artillery, ship, or a tank.

  Rather than just retrofitting our old buhough, I think there is something to be said about building a special artillery firing base a few thousa up, which is specially designed with exceptionally rge artillery. There, you could easily spot ships further in the distance, and take advantage of the exceptional range you could get from these shells. If we could make the shells rge enough, they could also pack explosive material inside while maintaining their mass, allowing for exceptional damage at range, especially when pared tur ons or even regur artillery.

  After some brief discussions about safety and risk assessment, I left Tiberius to tinue w on whatever he wanted. I'm starting to really feel like a manager with how many different projects I'm juggling all at once right now. I have a few ideas of things that I'd like to be looking into, but I don't know how much I'll be able to actually do so while I'm managing both the moving floor projed the lightstone facility.

  Every night, I found myself with time to work on my own projebsp; What I've started w on for the past month is a rge pressure chamber. We've essentially produced all the necessary pos to try to use the Haber process to produce ammonia, so I'd like to try my hand at that. We have a ready supply of liquid nitrogen, hydrogen gas, heat, and finely ground mage. With stone shaping, it's retively easy to make a very thick walled chamber that I reinforce with irs to hahe necessary pressures for the process.

  In a normal situation, pression of gas to reach the pressures necessary to drive the Haber process would be difficult to achieve without good seants, but with access to liquid nitrogen, we actually use the liquid nitrogen as a reservoir of pressure in a chamber that we heat to maintain a set pressure throughout the system until the liquid nitrogen has boiled away, essentially keeping the system at pressure equilibrium.

  The process yout requires more than just one chamber, since we're handling liquid nitrogen as well. There are a lot of details that I'll have to work out once I've got the general system id out, but I think I probably get it close enough that I try to fiu over the course of a few months to a year to actually produce a meaningful amount of ammonia.

  In two months time, I'm pretty fident I'm ready to try out a first test of some portions of the process. The po I've tinkered with over the past few months has been a system for maintainiively stant pressure though the system. The Haber process turns high pressure gaseous nitrogen and hydrogen into liquid ammonia, resulting in a pressure drop with the assistance of a catalyst. High temperatures and pressures must be maintained for the process to proceed, so I needed a way to maintain both nitrogen and hydrogen gas at pressure to the system.

  What I've settled on is a bit of a plicated process. Hydrogen gas is being produced by copper fluorite, then dried, simir to the other hydrogen produ facility. This time, however, it goes into a much rger chamber, desigo be kept at very high pressures. Nitrogen is provided as a liquid, and is used as the pressure regutor for the system. A pressure triggered valve drips liquid nitrogen into a boiler chamber whehe pressure drops below about 200 atmospheres of pressure, thus keeping pressure at a trolled value. The hydrogen has a simir system of a few valves desigute pressure in the rea chambers.

  Right now, I'm operating everything as small as I possibly , which isn't that small at all given I still had to make all the valves. However, the maers I made to read the pressure in the various chambers indicate that pressure is holding about where I want it to, meaning I try to move on to the stage, making the catalyst and attempting to actually react everything.