As the next semester started, I began the process of designing a printing press. A basic press would be easy to make, but would be a bit of a waste, so I jumped straight ahead to a rotary press. In the original printing presses, you'd have to manually align and press each page, which, while being a marked improvement over hand copying, was still slow and doesn't take advantage of industrial scale. A rotary press can take advantage of the fact we already produce continuous paper in our mills. In this way, the drum keeps rotating and printing each portion over and over, allowing rapid production.

The tricky part, however, was applying the ink to the rotary drum with all the individual letter blocks attached to it in a way that is consistent and in the correct amounts. For this, just like with many other projects however, my goal is simply going to be 'good enough', and from there I can either hand off design to a club or someone else. A single rotary press will already be an immense timesaver for production of certain works that could be reused within the academy. It takes time to setup the rotary drum and run everything, a process that needs to be repeated for each page you intend to print. Obviously, having more presses would allow parallel printing, but again, my intention is just to get the ball rolling.

What I found was that there wasn't a great way to apply it directly with mechanical systems. Instead, I had to transfer it using additional rollers that would bring across the right amount. I found that bargas leather, while not great, did the job well enough to be considered a success. Perhaps through different treatments of the leather, or through using a different material, some of the inconsistencies could be resolved, but again, I'm just looking to have it perform well enough.

Along various fronts things are progressing. Beyond myself working on the printing press this semester, our third island is in the process of being prepared for our large mana crystal. Other departments have also managed to convince a handful of students to stay on as faculty or assistants in some manner. We have a certain amount of Kemboran budget dedicated to hiring researchers in various areas of study, which has allowed us to support some positions that would otherwise not exist, though I am keeping a close eye on things to ensure that these positions don't become overly burdensome on the rest of our supporting society.

I think we're getting closer to my ultimate goal of being able to act as guidance for developing more and more technologies that I know of, rather than having to develop them myself. It's not at the point yet where I have people I can just direct to develop something, nor have I seen any student candidates who would be capable of that outside of their specialties. It does feel, however, that I'm at the point where once I get an idea on its own two feet, I can leave its further development to others. It might take over a decade before I find enough people to fill up a team capable of a full development cycle with little guidance from me, but the possibility of having an engineering department capable of that makes the effort worth it.

There was a large development on the mainland over this winter break. Word reached us that the human continent has had a demon invasion begin. There was also word that it has already largely been taken care of, and that it seems that they managed to repel it with ease using weapons that looked quite similar to the ones we provided the dwarves at the start of the war along with their own version of tanks and metal ships.

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I had two immediate thoughts when I heard this. My first thought was that I was right that the dwarven continent's invasion was probably the last invasion that would have any large scale casualties with the changes in the weapons of war we introduced. The second one was that it was clear that the elves have been guiding the humans on the northern end of the continent and clearly did not stop production because of the accident that occurred there.

The question now is, what is their longer term plan? They were clearly building weapons of war already, though they do have a valid reason for it, after all, demon invasions occur periodically. Now though, with the odds of another invasion occurring in the near future dropping to almost nothing, what will they do?

It isn't like we've been doing nothing either though, we've long since replaced the ships we lost at the end of the last war, and have expanded our fleet beyond those levels. Tank manufacturing has decreased significantly, but we're still producing artillery, guns, and ammo, and have been building defensive positions on both Kembora and Drazvok, turning the islands into fortresses.

That said, we could be overwhelmed in time. We can only produce and stockpile so much material as a series of islands. It isn't enough to just defend ourselves. We'd need to defend our mainland allies additionally to actually ensure our own survival if a war broke out. Resources are integral to a sustained war effort, and it seems like the time has passed where our technological superiority meant it was impossible to truly challenge us.

That doesn't mean we don't have a technological edge. In fact, I think we still have quite the edge. We're on the precipice of being able to create radar if we so choose, and there are dozens of other technologies we're on the precipice of that would turn a war in our favor if we pursue them earnestly. Things like aircraft and larger scale battleships are possible with some research.

For now, we're merely in a holding pattern as the situation is developing. The northern part of the human continent is a long ways away from the southern portion. There are concerns being voiced about the safety of some human nations versus others, and having to pick sides. From what we can gather, it does seem like the elves have shifted their strategy from trying to puppeteer all the countries. This may in part be due to their loss of full control in the dwarven continent and what appears to be a slippage of their control in southern countries of the human continent.

It is clear that they're still heavily influencing decisions in the northern part of the continent, but they might be attempting a different approach at maintaining control. From my previous understandings, they purposefully manipulated the situation on the human continent to prevent any one nation from becoming too large. The human continent is vast and spans more area than both the dwarven and elvish continents combined. By keeping the humans at odds with each other, they prevented them from eclipsing the elves' influence.

I could envision a scenario where they guide a human nation to take over both the human and dwarven continent, then use that power to snuff us out. There are risks involved in this, as the humans may stop following their guidance at some point, but the outcome of that is already what is happening now, a loss of control for them. In another few hundred years, it'd be easy for them to sow enough discontent to drive a civil war in the human empire they guided, and once again create a fractionated human continent, and return to the status quo. With their long lifespans, plans like this are something I've come to expect. It's possible that isn't the case, but we can start taking measures to foil such a plan if that is the case by improving our ties with some of the southern human nations and providing them with armed defenses at a discount to potentially slow any advancing army enough that we can outmaneuver them.

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