Many individuals from the city had started to show growing i in what exactly the barges were doing. They had a general idea of what was happening, but just hearing a muffled explosion that you 't see was enough reason to spark their curiosity. The thing that has been troubling me somewhat is figuring out at oint the leviathans have actually been taken care of. I suppose once we send barges out and nothing happens, we start to do smaller boat searches using viewing gss to try to peer into the water to look for them.
I'm less ed about the bottom dwellihans though. If a few cms or starfish are someeacefully living otom of the o, then so be it. If, after observation, they turn out to have some majative effe the enviro, then we could always try to create a depth charge to drop on them. Though by then, we might have better teology to deal with them. I nning on immediately tinuing work on the paper mill, but Tiberius asked for some help with the shelled crystal research, so I'll be doing that for a little bit.
Tiberius was somewhat limited in his research by the o wait for fluorite crystals to be grown so that he could record their data values iion to the mana crystals that he would embed in them. Long story short, he'd used up the sample mana crystals I'd given him for colleg data, and presehe data to me while requesting that I grow him rger mana crystals to tihe research.
Before I agreed to that and given his propensity for creating dangerous situations for himself and others, I reviewed the data that he'd collected first. In many ways, the data was as I'd expected. Thicker ses of fluorite shielded the inner mana crystal more, allowing it get closer to the surface before breaking. There was still a small but measurable increase in the mass of the fluorite with a mana crystal versus a hollow one, even after ating for the missing mass from the mana crystal itself. Due to there being too many variables betweehiess of fluorite and the amount of shielding that it provides to the internal mana crystal, it was inclusive whether the thiess of the exterior shell had a positive ative impa that sed order mass effect.
It seemed, from that data, that it probably would be us to try to increase the size of the mana crystals being used, a the process. I had only grown him some small crystals before, for obvious reasons. So I spent 40 days growing him some nele crystals, whided up verting most of our avaible crystal material into a handful of 8 and 12 inch mana crystals. I ended up strug a few more small crystal growth chambers to speed up future processes while I waited around for the slow process of dripping liquid crystallierial into each chamber. He got a few fluorite tests crystals ready in that time, but he'll be waiting for a while for ser oo be grown, so I should have a few months to work on the paper mill again.
I didn't have that long to tinue my resear the bck sludge recovery before the barge, but I spent the 35 days testing different processes. What I found was that a multi-stage process using multiple different kinds of stages did a good job of getting the sludge to a very viscous, and ultimately fmmable, resultant produbsp; The first stage is a simple evaporator, desigo recover a rge amount of the sodium hydroxide still left in the mixture.
Ohe thick resin starts to form, a rotating scraper be lowered into the evaporator to pull this resin material off the top and allooration to easily tinue. However, ohe liquid boils down to about 40% of it's inal volume, it starts to have issues with evaporation as it bees more viscous. At this stage, I tra to a special evaporator with multiple nearly vertical ptes. The ptes are heated from the sides, and the sludge is poured tinuously dowes to evaporate liquids out from the thin film running down. After a few cycles, the sludge bees so viscous that it has trouble in this stage, and moves on to the one.
For the st stage, the viscous sludge is added te spinning drum, which trifugally separates out even more of the remaining liquids. By this point, it seems as though we've recovered most of the sodium hydroxide and dissolved sodium sulfate, ae the impurities, it be reintroduced into the inal process, giving us a pretty effective recovery cycle. The remaining highly viscous sludge is very fmmable, and as such, be burned away alongside the resin like material we recovered earlier. That heat could be recaptured and used, but designing a whole process to do so takes a lot of time. Likewise, I'm sure that resin could find uses in future products. Someday, I would hope someone else will do so or maybe I'll e bad do it myself, but I have too many things I'd like to work on to spend time making this less wasteful.
This most ret barge nearly caused some real problems for us, though it ended up w out. This time, the barge almost pleted its long turn and made it back to shore on one side of the isnd. After a few hours of slress, it had turned in a wide ard nearly made it back whehan a half-mile from shore, a crab apped shut and blew the barge up. The cw was even more damaged than the first barge, due to the rger size of the newer barges.
The crab started to thrash, and it seemed like it was headed straight for us along the shorelihough I expect it was just trying to get to shallower water for safety. Iher case, before it got much closer to us, a rge jawed fish leviathan briefly fought with it, killing it. This time, the few hundred of us observers ended up gaining quite a bit of experienbsp; I myself gained a few levels, and most of the goblins said they maxed out their levels. Despite the risk, it was a treasure trove of experience for us.
I wonder if, despite the immediate death of sea life in the nearby area around the leviathan, the reason we haven't noticed any real drop in sea life is potentially due to this effebsp; I don't know the lifecycle of the sea life around us, but if leveling perhaps equates somewhat to maturity, the mass death might also cause nearby fish to reach reproductive maturity, and spawn new fish in short fashion, allowing a rapid bounce ba the popution. That's just a hypothesis, but maybe iure we create an aquarium and sea-life research facility to determihings like that.
I'm gd that I'm getting close to finishing the design for the neer facility, as we've been tinually ramping up nitrogly produ. Our paper stockpile is due to run out in the year or so, despite the old facility running full forbsp; The biggest problem with the old facility is the way the paper is dried, which is the st part of the process that I'm w on designing over here. In the old facility, we're using hand meshes to create the sheets of paper. Here, I've been w on a tinuous paper making mae.
I'm not quite satisfied with it yet, but I'm starting to get the process figured out. One of the difficult parts, that I waited 28 days to be produced, was a rge mesh roll of copper that I could use as part of the process. There are a few problems that I've solved, and a few problems that I still o solve to finish this process. The hardest part to design, and the part that I'm ultimately still w on to a degree, is accelerating the initial drying process. Heating the wet pulp doesn't actually help muitially. What I o do was actively pull the water out. To do that, I ended up settling on needing a rge amount of vacuum su to remove water from the pulp at various stages.
For now, I've been manually pulling the vacuum iing to get the water out before moving the pulp into ter stages of the process. I'll o design a meical vacuum pump for the tinuous process moving forward. From that stage, I've essentially started replig some parts of our manual paper process, utilizi wicks to pull more paper out, then drying the felt again. Ohe paper is mostly dry, we heat the paper while we dry it further, then press it down with high pressure to make the final paper produbsp; Meaning the only problems I have yet to solve are the vacuum pumping, and ying out the whole thing as a tinuous process, rather thach processing I've been doing in my test setup.