We received some very interesting news from the most recent trade meetings from the dwarven continent. We just returned from an eleventh trip to the summit to begin the work of modifying the thermal battery further when I was informed that we would be having a minister's meeting. The dwarves have pretty much recaptured everything, and some areas are reconstructed enough that they've started looking for more extensive trade moving forward. We've kept our representative on the mainland up to date on what sorts of goods we're interested in, and what we can produce, so they've been attending the meetings in anticipation of building out trade deals moving forward.

I had thought that I might have been overly paranoid about Elora back when we decided to expel her from the island, and then later, I was still quite paranoid about her being around. At the recent trade meeting, apparently some humans in conjunction with the elves have started producing their own fluorite crystal engine systems. I haven't seen them directly, so I can't say exactly what quality they actually have, but I'd say that it almost certainly is based on stolen designs. It's possible that Elora and the elves decided that engaging in combat with us would potentially be more trouble than it's worth, when they could simply wait to catch up with stolen technology before making a decision.

This is a problem for a few reasons, the least of which is actually them bursting our monopoly on some forms of mana engines. The first major issue is that I know that someone could make silver doped fluorite and create a radioactive dead zone that keeps producing radiation until the crystal breaks itself apart due to it's own radioactivity. In essence, it could be a dirty nuclear weapon that is capable of being produced with early industrial technology, which is a nightmare.

We're an obvious target for a weapon like that from the perspective of the mainland. If the islands are uninhabitable for a long time after a huge silver doped fluorite crystal is suddenly revealed on the island, the status quo on the mainland would simply return to what it was about 50 years ago. A slightly bigger problem is that we don't actually know what a lot of types of doped fluorite do because we haven't had access to the elements to test it.

A second issue is that regardless of anything else, the mainland has far more resources than we do, and they have extra space to work in. All things equal, if they catch up in manufacturing technology, then they'll outpace us quickly. For more complicated things like our ships and tanks, it'll take them some time to figure out how to make them, but I think the dwarven war has made it obvious that the path forward for war is utilizing this technology.

What the humans were offering were versions of existing technologies that were adapted to use fluorite crystals. They were offering hammer and grain mills, along with their own version of the magic oven. Their prices for the items are still quite a bit higher than ours, so I'm assuming they haven't quite worked out everything for full scale manufacturing. On the other hand, we're not currently set up with a factory to make any form of mill components, so it's possible that they'll outcompete us soon on those fronts.

We have the unfortunate problem of having to be choosy with what we make ourselves, because we don't have the land to make everything forever. There is only so much mana that occurs in a single area that we can use for manufacturing. We also retrofit many of our non-magically powered mills to use mana engines, since they're more reliable than wind power. In the distant future, we may end up having to go back to using other sources of power where available, just to fully utilize all the available energy on our islands.

On a closer timescale though, the plan is to utilize the academy to convert our economy from a manufacturing economy to an information based one. We'll still need a manufacturing base for nation defense, but if we're the main place the world looks to for innovation, and they'll pay resources to gain access to it, then our own lack of natural resources can be mitigated to a degree.

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If the elves think they can simply utilize our technology to make us irrelevant, then two can play at that game. Part of the reason they've managed to infiltrate pretty much every nation is their trained messenger birds that allow them to form a global communications network that can communicate fairly rapidly. Those birds though have quite the limited capacity in the amount of documents they can communicate with. I imagine that if radio technology ends up working well enough, quite a few countries would rather utilize it than rely on a spy to communicate for them.

As such, while we'll likely be the only real manufacturers of vacuum tubes for some time, I think our best move to disrupt our main political enemy is to actively provide all the means and information necessary to produce radio stations to the world. Decentralizing radio technology will probably disrupt elven influence rapidly, which might cause them to act rashly, but its a risk that I believe we should take in a few years time, when I've gotten it to work smoothly. We can start by reducing dwarven reliance on the elves by helping them install stations across their continent. From there, I'd imagine some humans will be interested as well. Even if they steal the technology and produce it themselves, that still achieves the same goal of disrupting elven influence. In fact, if they steal and use it, it'd mean it gets implemented even faster, so in this case I'd actually like that to happen.

Over the last 30 days, we've continued working on the getting what we could done on the thermal battery, while continuing to haul some materials up each time. The main thing we've been doing has been creating the vacuum hexagon insulation around the four horizontal sides of the battery. In the downtime between stints, I've been working on developing our own version of a standalone hammer mill that uses a mana engine which we can mass manufacture.

There was something else that I didn't consider that has ended up working to the benefit of the elves and humans on the technological development front. I discovered a while ago that testing for normal and low mana environments on our island is very hard. Even when I work in underground environments meant to replicate it to some degree, the regeneration rate and actual available mana don't line up perfectly.

In the near future, I think it'll probably be worth trying to develop some new detectors that don't just check ambient mana, but also the mana flux through an area. That would hypothetically let me develop a lab space that mimics different mana environments to allow better developmental controls. For the purposes of a hammer mill, it's not that big of an issue, with the main design concern actually being the development of a factory line to produce parts.

From what we've heard from the mainland, there is a lot of interest in the mana powered hammer mill specifically. Apparently, there are a lot of mountains that don't really have large enough streams for regular hammer mills and the mana powered ones potentially open up a significant amount of resource development in some districts. As such, it seemed like a good idea to try to capitalize on the demand while it exists. It sort of goes against the idea I had previously of not wasting manufacturing, but if the factory can more than pay for itself in sold product, then we can either decommission it, or repurpose the building itself and it's mana engines when the time comes, and most of the components are similar to components we already make, so there isn't that much to actually develop, since we've been using our own versions with mills and jaw rock crushers for some time.

In a few months, the path to the summit from inside the mountain should be completed, and in a similar time frame the new trade city should have its port functional. Not long after that we'll install the large mana crystal there. After that, we'll start dedicating some resources to developing the academy island. There will still be a lot of development that will have to be done for the trade city, but workers will be able to individually work much faster with the large mana crystal installed, so fewer will be necessary to keep pace.

The opposite problem will exist on the academy island for a while though, since it has lower than average mana. That's why, even though it'll be a few years before we plan to install a large mana crystal there, we need to start work now. Even the process of building out a location for a large mana crystal will take a considerable amount of time.

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