The first course of action that we all agreed upon was that we had to rebuild our infrastructure. While most manufacturing facilities only needed some minor cleaning and a few replacement parts, much of the transport infrastructure and some of the military infrastructure was heavily damaged. Roads, the tunnel, the aqueduct, and the cableway all suffered damage. The cableway had multiple portions collapse in landslides, which makes me wonder if the extra weight of the towers made the ground unstable. We've basically moved beyond using the cableway, so repairing it is not really worth it.
The tunnel, beyond having the two main entrances covered by landslides, also had a large amount of mud buildup. The side path that made it to the surface, and mud from the heavy rain washed down that path and covered a lot of the floor throughout the path through the mountain. Mud from the rain covered a lot of roads, even in places where there weren't any landslides, with a similar situation having happened to the aqueduct.
Two of the coastal pillboxes housing artillery collapsed into the sea, and one of the viewing stations up the mountain is completely gone. A few artificial eagle's nests also fell away in landslides, but none of the ones that did so were occupied. Much of the work that needs to be done doesn't require that much stoneshaping. Some does, but a lot of what we have to do just requires manpower to clear debris from roads. Manual labor is something we generally have an available excess of, so we'll be putting a large portion of the population to work cleaning things up.
Once most of the infrastructure is repaired, we'll double down on repairing the nitroglycerin factory in an attempt to finally rid ourselves of the aggressive leviathans around our island. Zaka was surprisingly eager to reclaim our other islands, in case any other demons landed on them, and the first step to doing that is to actually be able to get there safely. In theory we could use small canoes and probably make it, but that'd still take nerves of steel to accomplish, even if it should be safe.
The boats that the demons from Malagord came on should have been big enough to get some leviathans' attention. Perhaps due to the storm they didn't, or perhaps some of them did, and we only had to deal with those that actually make it to shore. In either situation, the number remaining does seem to be quite low, as conflicts between them have become practically nonexistent. We do still occasionally spot them. I suspect that if the factory hadn't been destroyed, we could have probably finished wiping the dangerous ones out in a year.
After a few days of discussion, a plan was drawn up. Until the seas are safe, Zaka will continue the summoning of new population. The majority of construction efforts will first be on repairing necessary infrastructure, followed by getting the nitroglycerin plant spooled back up. While that is happening, I'll begin development of a few new tools for us to utilize. We were so close to getting methanol production online, but that is now something that will have to wait.
Rather than continue relying on black powder for our artillery pieces, we're almost to the point of utilizing more modern smokeless powders as propellant. Not only is smokeless powder generally more powerful, but it's also safer to handle, more reliable, and less difficult on the weapons. Of course, it's quite a bit more complicated to make, and it's more dangerous to manufacture, but two of the three most difficult parts to make are nitroglycerin and diethyl ether, and we already have both. The other main component is nitrocellulose, which is a similar process in manufacturing to nitroglycerin, except it's a bit more dangerous, as we'll be working with a solid cellulose pulp rather than liquid glycerin. There are a few other additives that we'll have to improvise to make, which might make it somewhat less effective than actual smokeless powder, but it should still be a major step up from black powder.
The reason I'll be working on that project is for the development of a proper naval vessel. In the handful of years since we put the iron facility online, we've produced nearly 20,000 tons of excess steel after accounting for all the other machines and repairs that have utilized it. That's plenty of material to build either a singular large naval vessel, or a few dozen smaller vessels depending on how different components end up working together.
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Despite some amount of lobbying by the dwarves and even Elora, we will not actually directly help militarily in the conflict, if we can even have an influence on it by the time we'd be able to reach the mainland. We will, however, provide military aid to those who would consider themselves our allies if we're able to. In other words, we'll try our hand at arms dealing. We really don't have the population to have a meaningful impact in any one location, but we should be able to act as a force multiplier in multiple locations by providing advanced technologies. Though that aid will come with a hefty cost to the mainland which decided to isolate us.
For nearly two months, most of the construction effort was on cleanup of roads and paths and the cleaning up of the old nitroglycerin facility. I at least had a good jumping off point for researching nitrocellulose for that whole period of time. We've done the hard work of chemically purifying cellulose to make paper, so it was fairly easy for me to pull a large bulk of washed cellulose pulp to use for attempts at making nitrocellulose. Interestingly, it seemed like the nitrocellulose is actually somewhat safer to produce, and was less prone to detonation. Though it also was prone to only partially nitrating, leading to different quality products.
Some of the nitrocellulose would simply be energetically flammable, while other batches ended up being highly explosive. The actual degree of explosivity we'll need for smokeless powder is unknown to me. I know there is a sweet spot though, so I'll have to test different types of nitrocellulose until the final product is figured out.
My plan moving forward is to start testing different blends of materials for smokeless powder, and see what ones are worth pursuing and fine tuning further. If I can come up with a working design, then I'll design the nitrocellulose factory to meet the specifications necessary to produce it. Working and good are very different from each other however, and in the future I'd like to be able to throw some researchers onto testing different blends of materials to make a better smokeless powder. For now though, it's still a better replacement for black powder, and it removes two bottlenecks that we suffer from related to sulfur and potassium nitrate supplies.
Another two months have passed, and some of the nitroglycerin lines are back up and running. The major roads have been cleared, but quite a few side paths haven't been yet. I've come to a few realizations related to smokeless powder after doing hundreds of tests. First, the degree of nitration I want for nitrocellulose is high, but not completely nitrated. It should burn very, very fast, but I don't want it to explode randomly. Second, the diethyl ether isn't actually part of my final product, which I should have expected given how volatile it is. It just works as a solvent that dissolves the nitrocellulose and nitroglycerin and lets me mix them into a putty like material for shaping.
Third, I want about three parts nitrocellulose to one part nitroglycerin, or else the resultant mixture is too explosive. Fourth, and finally, there are a few additives we have that seem to make the powder more reliable overall, even if we only add a very small amount in. By adding in about 2% high-quality ground charcoal, 1% calcium carbonate, and 1% potassium nitrate, the powder seems to burn more evenly, and seems to be far more stable over time.
While I'm glad that I've found a powder design that works surprisingly well, it also means we have another production chain that's utilizing our limited calcium carbonate, even if it's in small amounts. We're also still using the potassium nitrate that we have in limited amounts, but considering black powder is about 75% potassium nitrate, we'll be using so much less than before that I'm not really worried about it.
We could look into artificially producing calcium carbonate from sea water if we were so inclined in the future. Now that we have sodium hydroxide available, we can bubble CO2 through it to produce sodium carbonate, and then use that to react with sea water to create calcium carbonate. The yield would be atrociously low, but that just means we'd have to scale things up to make it work. The upshot of such a facility would be that we'd no longer need to go through the whole process of harvesting float vines and sea shells to make our soda ash or lime.
