I've divided the work into three broad categories for the ship design and research, and set an internal time table to keep things on track. The first category are things that I shouldn't need to spend more than a day or two reviewing the results of research that other individuals do. Some things in this category include the armor joints, roller mill design, internal phone communication lines, and just about anything that was merely a directly scaled up version from our previous ship design like the bridge.

The second category are things that I'll need to regularly review to guide research with additional feedback based on other components. This includes things like larger turret design, larger ammo, and components of the reworked engine system. I've decided that we should rework the engine system for the ship based on some of our new designs. There will still be two steam piston engines that directly power the propellers, but they will no longer be tied to any other power on the ship. Instead, we'll utilize the information we've gained on power plant design to create an electrical system inside the ship to power most other things. Since the power plant design we've already made has the ability to automatically correct itself to a degree to accommodate fluctuating loads, this should reduce the overall demand on crew to operate the ship.

The third category are things that I'll likely need to research myself, or that I'll have to play a major assistive role in the development of. This includes steered torpedoes for leviathans, the concept of sonar, and the overall layout and connections between various components of the ship.

There are various deadlines for different components, each with intermediate deadlines to ensure that we're on schedule. If anyone falls behind, either additional personnel will be sought to assist them, or we'll have to figure out what kind of total delay we'll have to expect as a result. The first set of deadlines were set with the idea that we wouldn't have nearly as many personnel until after this year's graduation at the start of winter. So many of the first stages of development are actually just laying out the tests and designs to be tested in the future. Some though, like the roller mill and shaping for such thick armor is something that is beginning earlier. Since it will take a lot of time to actually manufacture and assemble the shell and armor for the ship, certain items like I-beams will begin assembly this year, and will begin to be stockpiled.

Zeb has also been tasked with once again increasing our iron production. It's possible we'll need something on the order of 60,000 to 100,000 tons of steel for the ship, which is orders of magnitude more than our current ship design. We'll need to significantly up our production to compensate, which also may require us to buy steel from the dwarves and humans, or for me to spend additional time developing electric arc furnaces for smelting to reduce our fuel demands, which would skyrocket with the amount of steel we need. With everything that happened, I put off designing said furnaces, but I may just have to go back and design them anyway.

This semester before work on the ship design should really ramp up, I've found myself incredibly busy in an effort to maintain the timeline. It's times like these that I'm glad I'm not also trying to handle all sorts of other problems myself, like diplomacy. Even if I'm not the one handling it, I still hear about it at minister's meetings. Both us and the other alliance are fortifying the border more and more. We're shipping out a significant amount of heat fluorite in an attempt to build out more mainland manufacturing as part of our arrangement in our alliance.

Most of these factories aren't military, instead they're variations on designs from our island that the mechanics team helped to propagate. Some of it is ore processing, but a large amount is actually textiles and food processing. Pretty much any province with a decently sized city on both the human and dwarven continents have started to use factories to handle these sorts of goods which previously relied on a lot of labor to produce.

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We've also helped the dwarves create their own fluorite growth area near their capital as a way to expand the production of useful fluorite. While the humans have protested somewhat that we aren't actually installing the fluorite manufacturing in their countries, the risk of them being invaded and that production falling into enemy hands is high enough that we are reluctant to do so. Instead, the price for fluorite is being artificially lowered below cost of production to keep the human alliance members placated.

Unfortunately, with so much going on in that regard, we're struggling with expanding our own production at the rate I'd like to see. An economy can only grow as fast as you can build it, and only when demand is there. We have the demand, but we're being limited by construction. In order to increase the construction rate, we're extending work hours and halving the number of days off for half a year. Pay will be increased in that time to compensate, but we were short on options.

My guess about needing arc furnaces was correct as well. After doing some math on what the rate of fuel consumption would become, it was determined that we would need an alternative method for smelting ores. The good news is that an arc furnace isn't actually too complicated of a process if you know what you're trying to create. The bad news is that the process of designing the furnace and the facility and peripherals to handle it has eaten heavily into time I needed to spend developing sonar and torpedoes.

The concept is pretty straightforward for an arc furnace. Massive electrodes are inserted into a giant crucible loaded with material, then electricity is arced between the electrodes to melt the material inside. The actual design, however, is more complicated. First, we'll need large graphite electrodes. These will need to be periodically replaced, so we'll have to have a facility that makes such electrodes. That process will involve making high quality carbon, and processing it into large electrodes. The current plan is to construct that facility on the dwarven mainland and ship electrodes back to Kembora. Without a good grasp on electricity, these electrodes aren't very useful on their own, so I'm not very concerned with the design being copied by adversaries. Further, by locating it on the mainland, the wood that will get converted into the high quality carbon can be sourced there, preserving our limited land space on Kembora.

We've made small scale electrodes out of graphite already, which we use for electrolysis, so we've already worked out a large amount of the process. It's just a matter of properly upscaling it and troubleshooting. I've left that to others to actually implement. I've started doing some tests with smaller electrodes to determine exact electrical properties so that I can at least have a good jumping off point for designing the larger system once I have the massive electrodes. Everything has to operate at just the right temperature. Too hot, and the electrodes will be damaged. Too cool, and the ore won't separate properly.

Thankfully, there was plenty of valuable information we've collected from our existing steel smelting that let me design some aspects ahead of direct testing. Things like the yield rate of slag versus iron for our particular recovered magnetite from basalt let me design the crucible to have openings in particular places to pour the slag off without losing much iron. Unlike our existing furnaces which are a bit smaller, this is going to be large enough that I'm going to utilize machines with operators to handle everything. My aim is to have the arc furnace smelt in batches of 100 tons of ore at a time.

Such a facility wouldn't be possible if we didn't have the power plants gathering power from multiple locations to bring to a single point. The mana density just isn't high enough to power such a large facility from any local generation. Though I've been distracted by developing the arc furnace, I've ensured that I'm still focused appropriately on hiring new graduates to work on the ship design. Overall, I've signed on 26 students that are graduating onto the project. Not all of them are just doing engineering and data analysis though. Some of them I've hired on to work as liaisons to bridge communication between different teams and myself. Hopefully, they'll reduce my workload in some areas enough that I'll be able to catch up with my own timeline for my portions of the project, as I was the only one to not meet my deadline so far.

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