Road to the Crown

Chapter 119: Problems with the design

21st April 1574

Despite how we arrived in the place rather late, with only about two or three hours before the sun would set beyond the horizon, rather than looking for the nearby villages where this huge crowd of people could spend the incoming night, I instantly pushed them to work.

Obviously, before the construction of the steam horse could start, I still had to take care of their basic needs, but that was something I thought about in advance. Following the example of the later ages, instead of making small tents capable of housing up to two or maybe three people, I ordered one group of people to bring the huge pieces of cloth along with the sharpened, wooden poles.

As soon as the materials arrived on the site set just beside the messy sheds containing the hole leading towards the depths of the mine, craftsmen received a rare responsibility to order the rest of the people around, erecting four massive tents almost in an instant.

With each one of them capable of housing exactly twenty-five people, I could house all the simple workers in the big tents, while allowing the skilled craftsmen to set smaller ones for themselves.

Thinking about this, I couldn't help but hope that the work on the steam horse could progress as quickly as possible since even in this limestone-rich land, it wasn't any trouble to find a reasonable amount of clay to warrant building a small brick factory.

Yet even this small project aiming at turning all of this temporary housing into a camp filled with sturdy buildings required the presence of the steam horse, not only for the sake of making the excavation job easier but for almost complete automation of the process shaping, burning and drying the bricks!

Obviously, while I could dream of automating most of the work that was necessary to get the finished products, even if I were to get close to this goal, a single type of work would remain fueled only by the power of the human muscles.

Heating the boilers.

Even though all the problems related to the production of charcoal could be simply ignored due to the fact that a huge forest was just beside the mining area, I still had to push some people to cut those trees, portion them and throw them into the ever-burning fire under the boilers of all the steam horses that I would build in this place!

My creative soul was screaming the ideas that could help to solve this problem, yet I simply didn't have access to complicated tools like conveyor belts or conveyor splitters that I remembered from one of the factory building games that I loved to waste my time on. No matter how much I racked my brains, the problem of delivering the wood to the fire, but in reality, all the other transportation problems that applied to all the other projects still required manpower to be solved!

At least, with the proximity of the river, I could build a simple conveyor that would transport the crushed limestone all the way to the building that I wanted to create at the coast, from where it would be dumped right on the back of the barges that would soon start to frequent this place. With its construction being as simple as putting a long layer of sewed together pieces of cloth on top of some simple rollers while making sure that the steam engine would keep it moving around, putting a single line like that directly connecting the output of the stone quarry to the shipping building was still within my means!

Just as I was about to once again throw my imagination in its full spin into figuring out how would this place develop in a span of not months, but years, one of the skilled workers approached me, forcing me out of my bubble back into the problems of the current day.

"Sir, the tents are all done, what should we do now?"

With how the very first thing I did after landing on the ground was to set up the chain of command with the craftsmen capable of ordering around a small group of common workers as they wished, rather than gathering everyone whenever a task was finished, I simply had to relay my orders to one of the craftsmen to have all of my subordinates start working.

"I don't think there is any point to waste our time on anything else than our main project. We need to move all the resources from the barges to the building site, and at least markdown areas where all the buildings will be set. I assume you received the blueprints?"

Back during the height of my boredom on the ship, I made sure to draw several copies of the blueprint for the steam horse and distribute it amongst the craftsmen to let them familiarise themselves with the design. As such, I could at least expect them to know the overall size of this stationary machine, giving me the chance to as them for this much, without bothering my own hands with doing it myself.

"Yes, sir. But about this blueprint One of my friends pointed out that it would provide movement only during the raise of the counterweight, meaning that as long as the burden will be greater than the pull on the weight, this entire machine, with all the respect to how ingenious the use of steam is, would stall. Ah, please, do not misunderstand, my lord. Rather than trying to oppose the idea, he proposed to make two machines at once, with one delayed just enough to provide movement when the other one is in the process of reheating."

Listening to the proposition of the courageous man in front of me, I couldn't help but once again sweep my impression of the people of this time under the rug while pretending it never existed. Rather than blindly following the blueprints, those early engineers managed to find this rather obvious flaw, and actually send someone to report it?

That by itself was quite commendable, as not many people of this age would dare to even express their doubts directly into a noble's face!

"You are absolutely right, but it's not like I don't think that solution would work, but we still need to start with something. With the limited number of small parts like valves or sprinklers, we can only afford to build a single steam horse. But as your suggestion is absolutely right"

Taking the blueprint from the pile made off my own luggage, I grabbed a small piece of dirt from the ground and added a few, ugly lines to the drawing.

"Since we have more than enough bricks and wood to set the layout of more than a single steam horse, you can reserve the space directly next to the one we can afford to build. Also, there is something you or your friend didn't think about."

Looking at the nearby place where in just a few short days, the most futuristic machine of this entire world would be built, I couldn't stop myself from putting on a hopeful smile.

"We don't know whether the process of heating and cooling will take the same amount of time. That's why I don't want to build more than one steam engines, before testing it out. Only when we will know the exact timing for the steam horse cycles, will we be able to come up with a design that will be able to work without rest!"