It's unfortunate how much more plicated each project I go to work on bees. It was only a few decades ago that the most plicated part of any project was simply finding the mao haul away the stone or to struct the buildings necessary. Nowadays I'm stuck troubleshooting for months at a time reted to the very real and intricate problems of maery and chemistry. It's helpful that I have the meics team to help with some of the problems, but their help is mostly reted to repair and instaltion of simple maes or mana engines. When something is moving, but isn't w right, they're not able to help much.

  Which is all the more reason I'd like to get the research academy designed and built. A pce where others build up their knowledge and mastery of a particur subject so they be the ones doing the troubleshooting in my pbsp; There always seems to be a more pressing problem that needs solved that's preventing me from actually itting to it. I had initially intended for the b space to bee something like that, but it quickly turned into a military institution for state secrets, which was, and is, necessary.

  I think I've almost solved all the problems with the paper pnt now, after 75 days of troubleshooting. I've solved problems ranging from pipes being too long to needing additional power in order to drive stirring rods in tanks that are at full capacity. We also had multiple problems due to the viscous and stiature of the bck sludge. The steel roller mill has mao exceed my expectations in that time, and they've produced some pretty thin foils to use for testing. I wish we had aluminum to use, but that'd be an incredibly difficult task to try to produce even a small amount.

  We unched ahree barges in that time, two of which killed a leviathan. The ohat didn't kill a leviathan hit a particurly rge wave at a bad angle, aonated on its own. It's a good thing the paper mill will start produg paper soon, as we've almost depleted our stockpile of paper. Thankfully, an automatic cutting mae is pretty straightforward to make, so we should have sized sheets of paper for dynamite produ within a few weeks of the paper mill being online, since I doubt they'd appreciate usira-rge rolls of paper for dynamite.

  The st 40 days have been quite fruitful and busy. The paper mill finally started to produce paper, and it only took 12 days to get a high-speed cutting mae made to both cut and roll the smaller paper pieces into dynamite portions. The number of eagles has been slowly increasing, and we had t and transport one again. This one also seemed to recover fairly well from the surgery and transport, so if we end up needing t another one, I'll have someone else start to take the reigns on it while I watbsp;

  I haven't been paying that close of attention to the eagles, but acc to the demons I've put in charge of it, we now have 27 of them living at various points on the mountain. They have distributed themselves fairly evenly around the upper portions. Though for the most part, the st 1500 feet or so of the top has bee alone. If the eagles keep settling here and we want to use the peak, we might o dig an underground path in order to bypass eagle territory.

  Tiberius has also finished up a whole new set of data for the embedded crystals. The data he's collected indicates a multiplicative effect betweeer fluorite and inner mana crystal. The rger either crystal is, the better they py off of each other. Though I'd guess that the multiplicative effectiveness will reduce beyond a size where a mana crystal survive at the surfabsp; Right now, the data is somewhat obscured by the fact that wheher crystal increases in size, the total system also take measurements closer to the surface, and as such the ambient mana values where measurements are happening are more scarce.

  Trends right now seem to show nearly expoial effectiveness with increasing ambient mana levels, while also showing a logarithmic limit reted to the thiess of the fluorite shell retive to the mana crystal size. If previous measurements of mana crystals are anything to go from, however, there is a non-linear retionship between mana crystal volume and it's ability to act as a mag for mana. All that to say, we o test with even rger mana crystals, and potentially rger fluorite crystals. Growing rger fluorite would require an even rger apparatus to grow a crystal in, or the use of less effective ptes in rger o do it.

  I settled on growing a 2-foot crystal for Tiberius to test with, though he's to use it initially for all the data colleg that worked at previous levels without breaking the crystal. Only after all that data is collected he get my permission to move it higher towards the surface where the crystal may end up breaking. I've also given him permission to study the existing fluorite growth chambers, and he attempt to design a rger chamber if he wants.

  I've started to attempt the process of turning syngas into methanol i 50 days. W in the b area lets me keep a close eye on Tiberius's researd development of a rger fluorite crystal growth chamber. I didn't even boing to waty of the leviathan barges this time. There is a ce I could gain a few levels, but practically speaking, the odds are quite low.

  I always o temper expectations and pns for Tiberius, as he immediately just wao jump to growing 8-feet fluorite crystals, not sidering the amount of difficulty that would go into such a devibsp; The 3-foot chamber took a lot of fiuning to work using charcoal pellets as a fire source, and upsg probably won't go very well with it.

  In short, charcoal, eveized charcoal, is too variable in quality and causes heating to occur unevenly to a degree. The rger the total apparatus size, the worse the heating problem bees as the fluorite crystal tapers off in the final stages of growth. So I've told him that he either try to make a 4-foot chamber work while solving all the problems that e from that, or he wait a bit to try and use a liquid fuel source, which vastly improve the uniformity of heat.

  Tiberius, always wanting to move forward at a breakneck pa his own work, decided he'd wait for me to make it easy with a liquid fuel, rather than trying to design a system that would handle solid fuel. That's easier said than dohough. My first attempt at making syngas from wood went alright at first gnbsp; All I had to do was heat wood in a low, but not zero, oxygen enviro. After doing some basialysis by cooling the gas and bubbling it through water, it was clear that I'd either o try different sources for the syngas, or there would be a lot of ing that would o be doo the gas before it would be useful.

  The wood based product was absolutely full of impurities ranging from tar to hydrogen sulfide. Thankfully, I did have a sedary option to try in the form of pelletized charcoal. The syngas produced from the charcoal ended up being signifitly more pure on the first try. Charcoal is obviously more inteo make, especially the higher grade charcoal we have been using to make pellets, but the differen initial syngas quality will affect the quality and maintenanecessary for methanol produ.

  While ethanol could be used for both the fuel for a hot air balloon and fuel for fluorite growth, we'd need a lot more crops capable of being fermented alongside pressure based separations to pass the ethanol-water azeotrope to make it into a fuel sourbsp; Add ora farmnd necessary to grow it as a fuel, and I'd rather utilize our natural wood supply for methanol which we use for other things. Methanol from syngas has the added be of being able to be made from all sorts of biological matter, which means things like algae could be used iure, utilizing more of our o and less of our limited nd.