While borders were being fortified on the mainland by both sides, further political entrenchment also occurred. Since it was apparent that the elves were on the other side, even if they hadn't declared it openly, they were expelled from countries in our alliance. Some individuals were concerned about the lack of available communications as a result, but we've assured them that we'll have communication lines back up as fast as we can.

Elves filled numerous roles in countries with their long lifespans and access to long range communication. We've already been training replacements at the academy for some of the guiding business and political roles that the elves were occupying, which was displacing them from some roles already. Radio, while a functional method to replace their communication methods, is still actually a bit of a waste to implement without a widespread electrical grid. Instead, it'll be far more effective to install telephone wires by adapting some of the radio circuits.

In fact, we should be able to build out various communication lines relatively quickly between locations. Due to still not having plastics or rubber of any kind, we're still forced to bury electric wires in conduit for insulation, which will slow down their construction. Even with that, however, it should be relatively easy to build a mechanical trenching vehicle to do most of the digging, and we can then run copper cable down conduits to provide multiplexed phone lines. If anything, this is a vast improvement over the limited amount of information that was able to be sent via elvish birds.

I want to be careful about not overengineering what we need, however. It'd be possible, for instance, to make subdivided conduit that could house multiple copper wires each separated from each other. That would require significantly more effort to make, since we're largely still reliant on stoneshaping to even make stone pipes in the first place. In many cases, the fact we are an island played to our advantage historically, since distances between locations were short enough that we could brute force certain infrastructure without worrying about a mass production method.

Since the pipe needs to be made of insulative material, however, I'll have to evaluate potential processes for doing so. The best method we can probably utilize is to use stoneshaping to merge grains of lightstone sand together in the shape of a half-pipe inside a metal mold. When we produce purified lightstone at our processing facility for it, it has to be reprocessed already, since a lot of the remnants are in smaller pieces or a sponge-like lattice. By crushing that and then pressing it in a long mold, we can get a fixed depth and length sand mold that someone with stoneshaping, with a bit of training, can merge into solid stone again. Rather than pull wire through the piping, we can lay half a pipe, then the wire inside that, then stoneshape the other half of the pipe on top to seal it in, with the same process being used to merge pieces of conduit together.

I considered the idea of having pipes drilled from stone instead, but there are two issues with that, the first is that the stone might have conductive portions or weakpoints prone to cracking, which lead to inconsistent quality. The second is that we'd still have to cut the stone to the approximate size, which still requires stoneshaping anyway, since dwarven block cutting isn't nearly long enough for that to be very viable. Since metal pipes would be conductive, and applying an insulative layer would be just as difficult as merging sand together, I'm left with the one option. The machinery for all this should be fairly simple, and if we locate the manufacturing facility somewhere close to our large mana crystals, the productivity of only a handful of stoneshapers making pipes should be quite high.

The machinery being simple is also quite important, since I'm busy handling academy related matters as well. Hiring on more individuals to expand the academy, including the creation of a human studies department is taking up quite a bit of my time. We've also had to pull some construction efforts away from our third island to create enough housing for new students. As I stated before, we're attempting to double our capacity to accommodate the handful of southern human countries we're now in alliance an with.

We don't need to hire everyone and build everything at once though, since it'll take four years for that increase to be fully realized. However, there is a lot of frontloading none-the-less. All of this is happening in addition to guiding others towards better improvements for our armaments. There have already been some minor improvements that have been uncovered for both tanks and weapons manufacturing thanks to research by the relevant clubs, but neither have made enough breakthroughs yet to warrant overhauling the full manufacturing process to make a new model yet.

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With another schoolyear coming to an end, there has been quite a bit of time for the situation to further develop on the mainland. I left most of the design for a conduit assembly process to the mechanics team to develop, leading to the creation of a facility that produces five miles worth of stone conduit a day, with each piece being fifteen feet long. We can avoid making any form of specialty pipe for any particular angles, since a bit of lightstone sand and stoneshaping can be used in the field to produce short sections that represent turns and angles. In a year, that's just about 2000 miles worth of conduit, meaning we should be able start connecting major cities to each other fairly quickly, with more and more locations being connected all the time.

I've also developed a trenching machine for construction purposes, which digs a two foot deep narrow trench to lay the conduit inside of. It isn't perfect, since the conduit is long enough that rough terrain can result in an uneven depth that needs to be further modified by hand. Also, this is a single copper wire line, even if that wire is fairly thick to minimize resistance. For the time being, that'll be enough to get basic communications online. We can actually branch the pathways as needed, as long as an above ground facility is built where we can make a switchboard for interchanging connections.

It's best to have those connections actually be centralized, rather than dispersed to allow for some amount of electrical automation to handle call switching. When the time comes, we'll start utilizing frequency modulation, just like how we digitally isolate radio signals, to multiplex multiple calls through a single wire. Though the immediate plan is actually just to use manual operators to connect two locations by physically connecting wires. The odds that two people will need the same wire for very long when it'll only be connecting key individuals is quite low, and would still be a drastic improvement over the birds. There is some added benefit as well that, until we actually need to multiplex the lines, we don't need to be as concerned with the precision of the electricity that is used for driving the circuit as long as both ends will handle what is used.

We also managed to hire on just enough individuals to handle the upcoming student load while also finishing enough buildings for housing and classes to handle next year's amount as well. By summer we should be finished with housing and new buildings, and by next year, I expect we'll have most of the faculty hired that we need. The northern alliance doesn't have perfect informational control, and we've heard rumors that they're also building training facilities to teach individuals how to build and operate their manufacturing facilities. We haven't heard specifics though, so I have no way of knowing if this is just a series of technical courses or a full blown effort to copy what we're doing.

We've noted that there are enemy ships that have started to patrol the waters around the border zones on either side of the human continent, which has made some people quite nervous, rightfully so. We've started to move some of our own ships to offset that concern. From what I've been informed of from our ministers meeting, the gap between the human and dwarven continent is going to be fortified at a few locations with artillery and spotting towers as a way to potentially halt any enemy advances through said gap.

Between each continent there is a gap though, so it doesn't fully prevent travel between the two, and the inland sea is far calmer and safer than the exterior ocean. The other two gaps are quite a bit wider, and feature more mild currents, though we do have plans to build artillery defenses along the dwarven side of the elvish-dwarvish gap for good measure. The upshot of some of this is that the distance around the human continent is fairly far, and historically most of their ship manufacturing was on the inland sea, meaning to maneuver around the outside, they'd have to travel all the way up to the human-elvish gap, then back down the whole continent, which amounts to thousands of miles. Even with self-propelled ships it would take weeks.

As much as I was hoping that I'd be able to develop things like reflector telescopes and synthetic plastics, I'm afraid I'm going to have to turn my attention towards military technology again. If the dwarven-demon war was the onset of world war 1 techniques, and the most recent demon invasion on the human continent signified the degree that those techniques when executed from the start provide superiority over those that don't have them, I fully expect that there will be a total outbreak of war soon, if only due to overconfidence from humans with a massive number of powerful weapons. It could even come from our side with a simple border skirmish. Both sides aren't quite industrialized enough yet for that outcome to be likely, but in a decade I'd almost expect it. As such, having an ace in the hole is a good idea, though we'll need to be cautious that they might develop their own secret weapons. They know of silver fluorite's danger, and it'd be possible for them to weaponize it, which is concerning.

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