We've been progressing along a few different fronts now. I've been overseeing the design and construction of the main components of the engine rooms of the ship for the last 3 months. During that time Zaka has been overseeing military practice and training around the fort on this side of the island in preparation for the landing fight. They've been doing two kinds of drills. One where the enemy army charges out of the fort to meet them on the beach during landing, and one where they hole up in the fort because we fail to damage it sufficiently with the new ship.
While I've been working on getting the engine areas set up, the less complicated portions have also started being constructed. The outer coating of the hull is being stoneshaped, and we've started some of the work for the housing, cooking, and a few storage areas on the ship. Right now, my estimate is that we'll have the ship completed in about 6 more months. We have to put the main deck on after we finish loading up the internals, and then build the superstructure and turrets, after which we should be good for the maiden voyage.
The good news about the way we've been doing things is that construction on the next ship can begin as soon as this first ship is done. I've explicitly designed everything to be relocatable, and have taught the workers at the foundry and drydock how each component is made, and we've made positives for all the metal casting parts for the steam engines.
Despite some protests from Zaka related to the dangers of me being on the new ship, I convinced him that I'll be necessary on it for the first while. I understand his concerns about the dangers of sending out important people when we really don't know the risks of using a ship this large in the ocean. The main fear being that it'll somehow attract a leviathan, with secondary concerns being related to the ship sinking or failing in some way. The counter argument I gave was that I'm going to need to be on the ship to troubleshoot issues that are undoubtedly going to arise, and that we'll keep four long canoes along the deck as emergency lifeboats.
Not everyone in the crew will be able to fit on them, but having some survivors will be better than none. If we had inflatable plastics, then we could probably fit more, but being forced to only use rigid materials means it takes a lot of space on the ship to keep smaller boats available. For the island hopping mission, we will be bringing more small boats along on the deck, but that's at the expense of being able to transport more goods. Anything stored on the deck heavily affects the ship's center of mass, meaning we can't carry as much stuff as a result. Between the extra soldiers we'll be transporting, extra food, and the landing canoes, we'll be pretty much full for the trip.
After two more months, we've added the main deck and finished getting all the internals set up on the ship, with one exception. We haven't moved the copper-fluorite boilerplates into the boilers yet. Those will be moved in just before launch, so that they don't overheat without water available to cool them. I actually had enough downtime while I waited for the deck to be installed that I've made a rudimentary rangefinder that I believe we can scale up to use on the ship. It'll take a few days to calibrate it, and we'll need to set up targets of a known distance to do so.
The principle is pretty straightforward. Essentially, you have two telescopes that are a known distance apart from each other. In the case of this prototype, they're 4 feet apart. By redirecting the light with some quartz prisms, we're able to redirect the two telescopic outputs into separate eyepieces. While looking through both, you turn a precision gear that rotates a prism on one side until the two images are completely overlaid on each other. Then, using trigonometry based on the angle the two telescopes are pointed, you can calculate the distance to the target.
In practice, however, calibration is required to actually get the distances, and rather than having to calculate the value each time, turning the precision gear also can move a slider that can simply provide the distance, because we can do all the math in advance. There is one small issue that I had to solve that probably didn't exist on earth, and that is that demons come in many sizes, with different spacing between our eyes depending on our forms. That means that I actually had to add a second set of prisms that can be horizontally adjusted to allow for wider eyepieces that doesn't affect the calculations for distance.
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While this prototype rangefinder is only 4 feet apart, I'd like the one on the ship to be 15 feet wide. During operation, I'd like three individuals operating the rangefinding system. One will operate the distance portion of the rangefinder, while two others will operate the rotation of the rangefinder, which will provide the angle to the target from the ship. With those two bits of information, a lookup can quickly be performed using range tables in the fire control center. Then, in a reverse operation to the rangefinder, two numbers will be provided to the guns as to where they should aim.
I'm glad that I found the time to get this addition designed before we started building the superstructure, because it's quite large, and would have been hard to retrofit the system. Now my main concern is whether I'll be able to get the range tables figured out in good time or not.
After another two-and-a-half months, we're getting close to launching the ship. We have a few weeks scheduled for final checks, and a few additional weeks beyond that for doing the basic training necessary so that we can fully operate the ship. I'm sure it will take more than the few initial weeks before the ship operates smoothly, but it should be enough to at least get it initially running. The rest will have to be learned on the fly.
The good news is that once we have one ship operational, training more individuals should be easy. In fact, I've purposefully designed the crew quarters to allow for double the number of personnel on the ship than is necessary to operate it. Not only to allow troop transport, but also to allow for secondary crews to ride along in the ship as training. Some of the cargo holds can also be utilized for troop transport with some amount of modification if necessary.
I've started to realize something interesting about our small country. Perhaps it's because demons become functional members of society quickly, but we have close to 10% of our total population in employ of some form of military service, which is quite a lot. Well, we will once we launch the ship at least. We have about 500 individuals in the military force, another 150 or so working as guards, and I estimate we'll need about 90 individuals to run the ship effectively.
We can probably churn out one of these ships every two years or so at our current pace. In that time, if Zaka is summoning at his full capacity, it would mean we'd make another 1200 or so population. Though in practice the amount of population is limited to much less than that because of housing and food production requirements. If some of the population is on a ship though, their old housing can be repurposed to support new population. Further, we can make special barracks style housing for the naval demons at a naval base for those who aren't actively utilizing a ship. That housing should be quite fast to build, even if it isn't near to the city where the mana crystal can be used to speed things up, and would be shared housing for demons to use when they're back on the island.
Most of the construction projects that I've requested and that we've been focused on for getting our military updated are completed now, so I imagine Zeb is going to once again refocus on housing with the construction crews. Since they finished the acid washed lightstone facility, which we needed for coating the ship, we've also started producing a massive excess of salt that we can utilize as preservatives for food, which is necessary for long ocean journeys.
With the extra fishing going on off the jetties and the generally higher amounts of fish in the tide pools thanks to the mana crystal, we easily produce enough food to feed twice our population, but we shouldn't neglect looking into other food sources moving forward. For example, around the edge of the ship there are a few locations that fishing rods can be mounted, potentially reducing the total food requirements on the ship itself. Net fishing utilizing a smaller trawling vessel might be something for us to consider in the next decade or so as well.
We stopped launching explosive barges about 2 months ago with the express purpose of stockpiling them to make sure that the ocean is clear when we actually launch the ship. While most of the dangerous leviathans are dead, there is still some evidence that some are out there staying hidden. We've utilized some viewing glasses in the water off of canoes, and found that there are a few leviathans along the seafloor in places, starfish and clam types for the most part, but we did spot one crab. We've had some discussion about whether we should actively kill them or not, with the consensus being we should, but only after we've dealt with our other problems.
While they aren't directly causing us problems, they're actively eating a large amount of food that could be eaten by smaller creatures that we could hunt ourselves. Even the clams filter feeding is probably disrupting the food chain to a degree. Though there is a question as to whether those clams might also be biologically filtering out some of the waste materials we're dumping in the ocean too.
