It took another 20 days to get all the production lines set up to handle some of the changed tank parts as well as getting those doing the assembly up to speed on the changes. Additional factories for nitrocellulose and nitroglycerin have also come online recently, and we've expanded the number of demons doing the manual stoneshaping for the bottom electrical components for our existing shells. I look forward to when I can start a new manufacturing line for azide primers to replace the electrical primers in some weapons. Chemical manufacturing processes are a lot easier to scale than manual assembly in most cases.

The downside to being out of the lab working on tanks has been that I haven't been able to progress at all on the azide front during that time. I do have to loosely monitor the sodium production when it is proceeding, so the most I've been able to do is think about how I'll be proceeding forward. I did at least realize something before I made a potentially fatal mistake.

I was thinking that it'd be energetically unfavorable to produce azide compounds, so I'd need to do the experiments at high temperature. However, it'd likely only be energetically unfavorable if I was starting from N2. In fact, since I'm starting from other nitrogen compounds that I already had to expend a lot of energy to convert from N2, it's probably going to be exothermic. If this is true, which is probably is, then if I had proceeded as I'd planned before, I'd likely have had some explosions on my hands. Instead, I need to install some stirling coolers in the lab to let me cool things down.

I spent another 25 days in the lab getting things set up to do my first unguided chemistry experiments. Pretty much everything I'd done in the past I had a pretty decent idea as to what I was doing. In this case, I still at least know part of the end product I'm looking for is, but the exact behavior any particular azide might have is beyond my knowledge. I have an understanding that most are probably explosive to some degree, given how unstable the azide ion is.

I waited to actually start doing experiments so I could take three days to test the new model of our tank. Ultimately, the changes do make it weigh a few additional tons and travel a little slower, requiring slightly stronger suspension to handle the increased weight. However, the comparison in ease of use and comfort is night and day. It's still quite hot inside, but nowhere near as hot as it was before. Some items have been moved around internally to make moving about in the inside space easier. Not only that, but I expect that they'll be losing even less steam thanks to a handful of leakage points that were discovered that were slowly seeping steam in the previous iteration.

Hopefully the changes will lead to better performance in combat moving forward. The first generation of tanks are probably better suited to being used for those defensive excursion forces centered around new watch posts, where they'll only need to be operated for short periods of time. There is still some scaling of production facilities going on around the island to increase our total output speed.

As production has continued to expand, there are pockets of lower mana that are occurring already around some of the busier manufacturing districts. I hadn't done a great job of explaining that these sorts of projects lead to mana depletion if they're too closely grouped together, but I took another two days ensuring that the proper ministers were informed about it to ensure that we aren't overly taxing any one area's mana too much.

That is one thing I didn't think too much about when it comes to the elves potentially stealing our fluorite technology. The issues with it being deployed in other places are two fold. First, their effectiveness is directly related to the ambient mana levels. Without a large mana crystal supplying more mana to an area, you'll need more factories that are smaller spread out over a larger area. Second, those same engines compete with living creatures for mana, so if you have people who are using mana for their jobs, their efficiency goes down too.

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It'll be much harder for anyone to replicate our mana crystal growth process, meaning we're essentially the only ones who can make the equivalent of power plants. It isn't yet clear whether or not large mana crystals actually increase total mana in an area, or simply redistribute it from further out to a more central location. It'd even be possible that they decrease total mana, though I doubt that is the case. Perhaps after the war I'll have one of our ships make mana measurements in a wide area around our island and try to solve that question.

The first few things I tried ended in complete failure. They either failed catastrophically or simply failed to react. I'm trying to do my best for safety, doing everything in a fume hood and wearing the best gloves we can make, which are leather. Even then, I've had to get replacement gloves frequently. We don't have that much leather, so it's actually eating through our supplies quite quickly. I was careful that the fume exhaust goes out of the roof and through a large fan to help disperse any hazardous fumes into the atmosphere. It is quite possible that some fumes might be toxic in even low concentrations, so short of reacting them away, which I can't guarantee that I do with every byproduct, dispersing them to minuscule amounts is the best I can do.

After the first five days of failures, I am fairly confident in two things. First, the process is going to have to be multistep and done at fairly low temperatures, probably in liquid anhydrous ammonia. Second, that sodium metal is probably going to be critical to the process. With those things in mind, I'm going to take a day here to plot out any additional pathways I think might exist by keeping those things in mind. I'm writing off the possibility that ammonium nitrate is a good precursor, since it's already a salt of an acid and a base. It's possible that I'll have to come back and re-evaluate that assumption.

After another ten days of experiments, I think I'm finally on the right track, though I'm running into a problem. The cold temperatures of the ammonia cause reacts to proceed quite slowly. By dissolving sodium into liquid anhydrous ammonia. It seems to slowly precipitate out a crystalline material that I believe is sodium amide. This precipitate only forms after some time as the ammonia boils away. I also assume, though am not certain, it is carrying away hydrogen gas as well.

There are a few pathways chemically that I want to explore using the sodium amide to potentially get to sodium azide. The most straightforward, that I hope works, is that nitrous oxide reacts with it, with the oxygen pulling off the hydrogen pair to make water while the nitrogen pair trades places making sodium azide directly. If that doesn't work, I'll have to start trying other things to make further intermediates while trying to attach more nitrogen atoms in a chain one at a time.

Initial results of the nitrous oxide tests didn't look great. Which had me discouraged for a few days. It wasn't until I decided to try keeping the sodium amide dissolved in anhydrous ammonia and bubbling the nitrous oxide through it that I had a breakthrough. Initially, I tried using a stirred reaction chamber with powdered sodium amide and nitrous oxide gas. While some small changes happened, the gas and solid states really didn't seem like they wanted to react much.

With ammonia acting as a solvent, however, things seem to proceed much smoother, and the eventual precipitate that forms behaves differently than the sodium amide I made previously, indicating that some form of reaction has taken place. After a total of ten additional days of experiments and testing, I think I might have sodium azide. Unlike the amide, which formed a base when dissolved in water, this new material bubbles and eventually exploded and released a quite pungent smell.

Within a few minutes, I had a headache, and noticed my HP dropping, so I quickly left the area with the fume hood running. It took two days for the symptoms to clear fully as well. If I had sodium azide, then the addition of water probably allowed the sodium atom and a hydrogen atom to trade places, with the hydrogen azide causing the poisoning symptoms. Given the explosivity I observed, I believe I'm probably on the right track. The next thing I'll need to do is figure out if sodium azide is sensitive enough on its own, or whether I need to try swapping out the sodium atom with other metals to make a shock sensitive explosive.

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