There was a lot of uncertainty while we waited for the ship to return with the response from Kao. The ship set out on schedule with Shasta on board to negotiate. While I initially was going to go along, it was decided that I should stay back to work on the development of the Tank. There was some dispute over who should go along to represent our interests, but ultimately Zaka was the one to go. He felt it was in our best interest that he familiarizes himself with the other islands, if only in passing, as well as what more of the world looks like.

After fifteen days passed, we'd determined that either negotiations were successful and they were gathering up refugees, or something horrific had happened, and the ship was lost. Since only time could actually provide us with an answer, I redoubled my efforts on developing the tank. The next test crystal was already waiting for me after we'd concluded the meetings and the ship had set out, so I began the next set of tests to help determine the exact combination of fluorite, mana crystal, and copper heat sink we would use for the tank's engine.

The good news was that I did manage to narrow down what I determined to be the best compromise between stability, efficiency, and net power output, the tests did render that particular fluorite crystal unusable, but the mana crystal should be able to be recycled and used again without any modifications.

After the tests concluded, I spent time harvesting fluorite, since we'd need plenty of it moving forward. With my new thermal capacitance, I can spend quite a bit longer in the heat of the mine at a time, though I take proportionally just as long to recharge resulting in fewer but longer trips. It's a bit better returns on time and mana though, since I waste less mana walking in and out of the mine.

The longer time spent recharging mana also meant I had longer periods of uninterrupted time where I could focus on designing components for the tank, now that I've determined the design for the engine's core. Using that design, I can begin designing and testing specialized shock absorbers to hold that core inside its boiler. The plan for testing is pretty straightforward. The tank itself is going to have suspension, which should reduce some of the high frequency vibrations, but may introduce larger bounces into the system.

While that's good, I'll need to compare the natural vibrational frequency of the tank to the frequency of the springs I use for further reducing bounce on the engine core. I plan on mounting it in the center of its boiler tank, held via eight springs each centered on a face of the octahedral core. As long as the sets of springs that act as suspension don't resonate with the springs in the boiler, the water in the boiler should further dampen any vibrations, and leave the boiler fairly stable. From there, it's only a question of how to fit all the various components into this one large tank.

As more time passed without the ship returning, everyone became increasingly restless, despite the fact it was still too soon to actually be concerned. This ended up resulting in a positive outcome for us that I hadn't anticipated. In a short period of time, two different demons, an ogre and a high prestige hobgoblin both developed the ability to summon imps. The only real benefit we currently gain from having more demons that can summon imps is removing the need for Zaka to handle it personally, since our limiting factor on growth is still the construction of housing, rather than the ability to summon more imps. We kept the news under wraps, under the hope that others might also develop the magic before Zaka returned.

This did not, unfortunately, end up happening. After an additional 22 days, for a total of 37, our ship returned with Zaka aboard it. In addition to Zaka, Shasta, and the crew, they also came to the island with about 1500 dwarves. They weren't the most robust of individuals, with most being women, children, and the elderly. I was assured, however, that most of them had a drive to work to protect their homeland. Many of them also have family directly fighting in the front lines, so contributing directly to endeavors that may increase their chances of survival seemed to fire them up.

That many individuals all at once was a cause for some concern itself. After all, we didn't have nearly enough free housing to support all of them, though we actually do have enough excess fish meat to supply that many people due to our glycerol production needing plenty of fish fat. We had literal tons of fish meat being turned into chum and thrown from our fishing jetties just to get rid of it all.

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Temporarily, many of the dwarves shacked up together in the old dwarven quarter of our city, while others took to using the tunnel as temporary refuge. We'd planned for the need for more housing before hand, and Shasta had informed many of the individuals of the fact they'd have to build out their own housing as part of coming here. We were also selective about which kinds of refugees would be helpful versus not. We weren't going to prevent someone useful from bringing their children or elderly, but we needed most of the individuals to either be masons, miners, blacksmiths, or foremen. Anyone who didn't fit into those categories would be used for physical hauling labors.

The initial plan was straightforward when they arrived. While the blacksmiths would be brought along to some of our metallurgical facilities, the rest would be excavating tunnels in the mountain to gather the necessary bricks to build out their housing. Those tunnels could lead us to resource deposits that could be valuable moving forward while also increasing the amount of water that trickles out of the aquifers in the mountain.

After they've completed their necessary housing, we have other buildings and projects that they'll be assisting in the construction of. By that time, we expect that their blacksmiths should be familiar enough with our processes that they could work in the new facilities as needed to help produce either ships or tanks.

All the new buildings will also require more fluorite, which means I really need to get the mine cleared out to the point that other individuals can operate it with the assistance of cryogenic fluids. There is only so much design work I can do at the mine itself before I need to leave it for a period of time to being the physical testing of design components for the tanks. During those 22 days where we were still waiting for Zaka to return, I'd only spent about 8 days at the mine, with the rest of the time being spent testing out various designs for springs for the tank.

After gathering some data, I'd spend a day or two back at the mine drafting up my next tests before spending a few days getting the components made and testing them again. It's a tedious process that I'll probably be repeating for a few months as I work through designing and refining the tank.

The first facilities that needed to be built were more raw material manufacturing processes, with the main focus being on iron, charcoal pellets, and fluorite crystals, with a secondary focus on finishing the new air liquefaction facility for mana crystals. After all, we'll need plenty of these materials for both final products and the facilities to produce intermediate products.

The plan is currently to double our charcoal pellet and fluorite growth capacities while quadrupling the amount of iron we produce from basalt. We've been using the existing iron production facility to occasionally test samples of rock acquired from the tunnels that are being dug in the mountain, and when particularly iron rich samples are found, the stone that the dwarves extract from that area is set aside for later processing, rather than being used for housing.

In the thirty days that I've been working on the tank design, many of these facilities have started to come online. The first one to be finished was the second facility for producing charcoal pellets, followed shortly by additional chambers for growing small and medium fluorite crystals. The new large chambers require additional methanol to operate, and are somewhat lower priority, since medium crystals are the ones that we cut into plates to power our buildings and ships.

Expanding the existing iron facility isn't going to cut it for what we need. It was designed around the idea of utilizing our dam to power some of the process while also supplying the water necessary for the facility to operate. Since we can't directly expand the existing facility, we're instead going to build out a larger facility a few hundred yards downhill from the first one. This facility will have it's own reservoir that it charges from the stream water. We've steadily increased the amount of water being supplied and released from the dam at a time thanks to our various rock dams and aqueducts, so it won't cause a water shortage.

The main issue with the new iron facility without the mechanical power of the dam, we'll have to rely even more heavily on mana engines to power everything. My hope is that we'll be close enough to the large mana crystal that we won't run into mana density issues. There are literally hundreds of machines that will be operating in the facility, so it'll have quite the power demand. If it all works out though, we shouldn't have any issue meeting any new production demands for ships and tanks as far as raw materials are concerned.

The dwarves have been building pretty minimalist housing, so they've provided about enough housing for half of them. Another ship load should be arriving soon though, so that percentage will go back down, but I'd expect in about 50 days they'll have finished their basic housing and we can distribute their work into other facilities. They've been helping with some of the new buildings when foundations need to be cut from rock to provide a flat surface, but no construction so far.

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