It's been a busy twenty-five days. One of the final tasks before we launched the ship was transporting all the boiler heat plates across the island. That took a little bit of ingenuity to pull off, and ultimately, we had to pull them in carts one at a time while submerged in a water tank. The water kept each plate cool enough that they didn't get damaged while being transported through the mana rich environment of the island. The tank needed to be refilled periodically until it reached the ship, which then in turn needed to be constantly supplied with fresh water until we launched it into the ocean three days later.
Let me just say that launching a ship from a dry dock is nerve-wracking. It really does seem like the ship might just tip over and sink because of it's momentum as it slides into the water. When you've spent a few years working on something, and you aren't sure that it will work, that tipping motion is initially terrifying. The ship righted itself though, and my concerns about it falling apart or suffering some catastrophic failure during launch seem to have been ill founded. The total weight of the equipment on the ship came in a little under my expectations, meaning we were able to add extra lead to the keel, increasing the stability and more than offsetting the extra weight caused by the exceptionally large rangefinder at the top of the superstructure.
Once in the water, the real tests began. Not only of whether the two main power plant systems worked, but also whether potential crew members were prone to sea sickness. The ship is pretty large, so the potential should be relatively low, but even so we don't want anyone who can't handle themselves on the ship. Training was handled simultaneous to various checks to equipment, with those who would potentially be in charge of things like boilers or artillery tailing me as I ran various checks on their respective equipment.
I'd tested most of the components separately on land when I was designing them, but we still needed to ensure that nothing was damaged during installation. Thankfully, most of the problems were pretty minor. A few pipes that hadn't been pressurized with steam had leaks that needed to be fixed, and some of the manually operated lever and crank systems required me to design a special oil can with a long, thin nozzle so that they could be lubricated, but other than that most things seemed to work well. I'll be busy for a few weeks training the potential crew while supplies are transported and loaded onto the ship. Then, we plan on setting out to try to retake the first of the other islands.
After twenty-two days, and only three days before we planned to set out, Elora received an update as to happenings on the mainland. Things have gotten messy, apparently. The dwarven continent is at a stalemate, but it's suspected that the demons are slowly conquering more and more of the mountainous center region that is isolated from the outside and encircled by demons on all sides. While more human armies have arrived to help the remaining dwarves, the elven continent has started to receive minor landings of demons on their inner coast. The current understanding is that they're likely setting off from the dwarven coast.
While these landings have mostly been caught early, it's resulted in a few of the human armies and most of the elven armies staying back to patrol their coast. Many of their ships have been dedicated to patrolling the inner ocean's waters as well, resulting in less supplies making it to support the forces trying to retake the dwarven continent. Because demons spread and reproduce quickly, leaving the elven continent lightly defended in order to stage a joint assault could spell catastrophe if something went wrong. The humans have started ramping up ship production as a potential method to alleviate the risk of inland sea attacks to free up the elves to participate in the war fully, but that will take a few years before they've produced enough to be meaningful.
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I was reminded that Rathland, at one point, had quite the large militarized navy, but we sank a large amount of it. Most of the countries don't have militarized navies, the dwarves had quite a few smaller ships to discourage human aggression, and two other human countries have militarized navies. With the dwarven coasts almost entirely captured, about half of those ships were also captured. Add on that one of the three human naval forces was greatly weakened by us, and I've got a good idea of why this struggle is happening. I don't feel any guilt for that, however, as we weren't the aggressors in that situation, but it doesn't change the fact that is happened and it's unfortunate.
After three days, we finally had everything and everyone loaded, and we set out after launching five bait barges over the prior 12 hours and deciding it was safe to head out. I've also brought a handful of scientific equipment with me for measuring mana levels, temperature, wind speed and direction, and barometric pressure. All of which is actually quite important to the function of the ship. Ambient mana affects the effectiveness of the ship's engines, temperature and barometric pressure can help us with predicting incoming storms, and wind will be important for calculating artillery trajectories when we start making range tables.
I took meticulous notes of the mana levels as we travelled. The first interesting pieces of information is that the front of the ship has quite a bit more ambient mana than the back where the boilers are situated. This also happens to be where the crew quarters are located, which was by design. Since the area by the boilers is so devoid of mana, I've taken to making the mana readings at the crew quarters to try to get the best approximation for the ambient mana.
From what I can tell, my guess as to how the mana levels work was pretty close to correct. Mana levels dropped on an exponential curve centered on our large mana crystal, but as we neared the next island, they seemed to stabilize. I expect that if we were to continue on, they'd slowly rise back up to what would be considered normal levels, though at what rate, I don't know.
It didn't take us very long to get to this island either. Between the higher ambient mana levels for most of the trip and the fact that I was used to far slower ships rather than this steam and propeller powered ship, we made it there in just over two hours. We travelled noticeably slower as the mana levels dropped closer to the island, which I expected would be the case. A halving of the ambient mana does not equal a halving of the power output of the steam engines, instead it seems to scale with the square of the ambient mana level, meaning the difference from the far bay to here was closer to 1/50th the power.
With plenty of daylight left, we started preparing our attack. We had decided that our best option was to attempt to quickly land the armies because the ship would be so eye catching that we needed to land before the enemy catches on to what is happening. By the time we had dropped anchor a few hundred feet from shore, we were already lowering the landing boats into the water full of troops.
We were right about them quickly wanting to investigate, as by the time the first set of landing boats made it to the shoreline, the other demons had already sent a group to the coast to investigate. A skirmish broke out on the coast with more casualties from the opponents than us, but a few of their scouts escaped and made it back to the fort to alert the rest.
They then seemed to decide that holing up in the fort was their best bet. If they voluntarily surrender, then we plan on letting them live, but otherwise, it'll be all out war. Our plan is to land all our troops and supplies, then offer them an ultimatum tomorrow. We've spotted a few different campsites on other parts of the island that we'll be keeping an eye on as we proceed. We've already found one problem that we should be able to solve relatively easily when we return home, we need gearing controls for the artillery turrets. They currently have a fixed speed they rotate, powered by an electric motor paired with an alternator down in the engine rooms, but that limits the precision that we can rotate them with. We either need to slow it down, or provide a gearbox that can adjust the rate they turn at. They turn pretty slowly already, but at even medium range, being off by a fraction of a degree results in large deviations off the target.
