Chapter 180: 180: General Electric

Okay, so this is how an electric motor works:

Elliot then went into a long and convoluted explanation that for the most part, went over Calvin’s head, including when he got to Lorentz Law, talking about magnetic fields that he’d never seen nor heard of, forcing the copper rotate to align with it, along with anograms Elliot obviously expected him to understand and didn’t bother explaining, such as back EMF.

You know what, just give me a second, I’m gonna load something in Visualize.

A minute later, a picture popped up in Calvin’s mind’s eye. One of Elliot’s ‘motors’, a simple ring of tightly wound copper hovering above a lodestone.

Now, when electricity goes through here, it follows the path of the copper, -this copper is insulated, by the way, so the current can’t jump straight to the end –  forcing the electrons to go in a circle like this forces the magnetic field of the copper wire to align, lusting after the magnet. This process causes the loop of copper to turn, then the other side wants to go after the magnet, causing it to spin. I’m extremely dumbing this down for you considering you’re all spear-chucking savage.

Lusting?

Shaddap. Anywho, this single loop is slow and only has force exerted on it at odd intervals, making it turn at variable speeds, the solution is to add another loop.

The loop doubled, making two loops perpendicular to each other.

Then you want an even smoother turn, add another loop. And another.

In Visualize, the loop of fine copper with a single magnet was replaced with a snarl of fine copper tightly wound like the thread around an old woman’s awl, held together with rounded iron plates.

Now, since there’s no single magnet big enough to run a train – barring magic, of course – we’re going to use an electromagnet.

The outside of the motor was filled in by a massive set of iron plates threaded with even more copper, making a downright confusing snarl of copper and iron.

Now all you have to do is scale it up  - The motor increased in size in front of Calvin’s eyes, becoming larger than a man. two bundles of copper wires jutted out either side, connected to both the exterior and interior.

Have one of your E-Savages feed lightning through these two ends, and Blam, a simple, lightning powered train engine.

A fan appeared at the back of the motor.

Maybe add a fan to deal with overheating.

Calvin rubbed his hands together and glanced over at Kala, who was scribbling desperately in her journal, tongue peeking out the side of her mouth as she concentrated.

“Did you get all that?” He asked.

“mmmaybe?”

“I’m sure we’ll understand it better after we try it a couple times.” Calvin said.

Calvinian Summoning.

42/47 Bent remaining.

Just under a hundred Knick-knacks coalesced out of green smoke, adding even more of the metal men to the already bustling scene.

“Alright, today we’re going to be building a train,” Calvin said, hands on his hips. “Something I have very little knowledge of, except for the basics…”

I wonder if I could use Lure parts that make a train that runs off of greed. That would work really well.

“Focus,” Kala chided.

“Right.”

Visualize.

Calvin pictured the train’s wheels, designed to cling tightly to the track, then the system of gears to provide them with power, the base of the trains’ floor, resting above, then the cargo container walls.

Then he went back and meticulously made sure the gears all connected back to a single space in the front of the train that would provide all the force, where the motor would lie.

Calvin spun the wheels in his imagination, watching as they behaved exactly as he intended to them.

Then he mentally pushed the Visualization across the link between him and the Knick-knacks.

The knick-knacks immediately got to work making his vision a reality.

Drafting has reached level 19! 90%  

Foreman, the third Ability that he’d chosen for Drafting, allowed his Knicknacks, or anyone else working on his behalf, to receive a bonus equal to his correction to their attempts to make his design a reality.

It was an excellent Ability for the leader of a construction company to have.

Oddly enough, he didn’t notice a terrific difference with Kncik-knacks, but that was likely because they were already so fast and precise. Doubling their accuracy most likely made a difference, only the difference was so small as to be imperceptible.

On sloppy humans though, it made a huge difference.

The Juntai men hammering iron spikes into the rails with heavy iron mallets were working like a well-oiled machine, their motions quicker and more coordinated than they might have been otherwise.

They had wanted to stay and help lay track, and Calvin had allowed it, despite the fact that Knick-knacks could’ve done it faster and likely better.

Still, it was free labor, and the more they worked on the track, the more they felt like it was theirs.

Calvin glanced over the track itself, stretching back toward the city, and the track going forward, where giant knick-knacks were ripping up trees in a straight line toward the mountains, followed by two giant slugs eating aforementioned trees, all while a bucket relay of knick-knacks fitted with little piping mechanisms ran back and forth between the slug’s teats and the rails, working seamlessly to create new bars of steel one after the other, cutting them apart when they grew too long.

Calvin could have made the entire track a single piece of iron but that would have made repairing the thing damn near impossible for anyone but him.

Calvin wanted repairing the track to be something a nation could do.

Something his nation could do.

Twenty-seven miles so far today. Calvin thought, glancing up at the slowly lowering sun.  his minions were laying track at about a walking pace, or three miles an hour. His summons lasted fifteen hours exactly, allowing him to do approximately forty-five miles of track per group of summoned creatures.

A full group was six large knick-knacks to remove trees, 5 summons worth of smaller ones to clear brush, strip trees and pack earth, and two huge Calvinian Mass Converters to convert raw mass into the steel rails that they needed. That was thirteen Bent per day.

Calvin regained just over twelve Bent daily, so he was operating at a net loss, not including Nadia’s contributions.

If he included her contributions, that meant he had enough spare to see to the construction of the first train to take everyone back to the city for the night.

Calvin was briefly tempted to summon another group of knick-knacks and CMCs to work through the night while he slept, but he didn’t feel comfortable letting them lay track all night without human supervision.

Construction of the train’s body went smoothly, albeit in a sort of shower of sparks as they used the saws built into their hands to cut rough-formed globs of steel grown off a nearby rail into wheels, machining out areas where the additive sculpting method of piping in undifferentiated matter was ineffective.

They took the wheels, stood them up and created a pole between them in a matter of seconds, then welded them together using undifferentiated matter, then started on the next set of wheels.

Huh, I never thought to use it as a welding material, I wonder where they got the idea.

In a little under a half hour, the knick-knacks had created the head of the train, then began rapidly building simple open platforms behind it at Calvin’s instruction, neglecting the box-like side walls.

They could sit out in the open on their way back.

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As the  train was shaping up, Calvin set another team of Knick-knacks to the task of creating a motor for it.

A little backstory:

According to Kala, the Juntai believed that their control over lightning was a gift to their people specifically from the gods, and it was taboo to tell outsiders how to gain the Skill. Which is why Calvin had her do a little asking around to see how well received a gigantic engine designed to harness aforementioned divine power might sit with the natives.

They had those massive flywheels dotted throughout their cities, designed to store the Bent of their warriors from day to day, to be used as heat for women to cook, to heat houses and dry laundry, fry criminals, smelt iron and bake clay into bricks.

It was the strangest thing that they had the technology to spin a flywheel, but not apply it to anything except heat generation. Calvin couldn’t quite figure out what the barrier was that prevented them from reverse engineering those flywheels to create transportation.

Until he understood the role the Diocese played in their society. Only the Diocese understood the divine gift enough to use the relics of the ancients.

Or in other words, they’re the only ones with a basic education on electricity and they’ve used it to become god-kings. Nice.

Which was why, when people asked him what the Knick-knacks were making, Calvin pretended to be receiving divine instruction from the Diocese of trade to create the engine.

One thing Calvin had come to realize in his lifetime was that if someone repeats something emphatically and with enough conviction enough times, people will believe just about anything.

Especially if they’ve already been trained to believe it.

The hardest part of the motor had been finding an insulator. Good iron was plentiful, good copper was plentiful, he could grab a sample of either and have the knick-knacks grow more as necessary. The plates were easy, springs were easy, the brushes were easy, but making the damned insulator was a struggle.

The Juntai used a certain tree-sap as an insulator, but it refused to apply in thinner quantities, and it was lumpy and impure.

Calvin was forced to assign a seperat unit of knick-kacks to the task of finding a good insulator, boiling and filtering the sap of the tree before applying several different alchemical ingredients to it.

It had modest success, but they were unable to find something that could be applied in a coat invisible to the naked eye, like in Elliot’s picture, and the coats had a tendancy to flake or chip.

I need to somehow raise the durability…

Calvin blinked.

I’ve got something exactly for that. He thought, hand touching on the Mage Armor component on his belt.

Why not mix the sap with refined Toad glue? The three headed toad from the abyss had a mutation that allowed it’s skin to be more resilliant than common sense dictated that it should be.

Calvin flew back to his wagon, dug through the jars until he found Toad skin powder, then flew back, all in front of gawking Juntai workers.

When he got back, he instructed the knick-knacks to make new mixtures with the addition of toad skin powder.

The resulting substance was an unbelievably fine mix that seemed to drip off the wire it was coated on, yet just enough of it clung to prevent electricity from jumping from one wire to another.

Try as he might, Calvin couldn’t bend the wire in such a way that the coating came off, provin git’s effectiveness under strain. It held up well to heat as well, only burning off once the wire itself took on a cherry red hue.

Excellent.

Once Calvin had his mix, he set the Knick-knacks to assembling the motor that would power the train.

The motor was about three paces wide and nine paces long, a massive array of coiled copper wires, and it grew at blistering speeds in the center of the head car as the knick-knacks coated and wound wire, assembling the plates at high speeds, tack-welding them in place with tiny dollops of undifferentiated mass.

The creatures weren’t slowed down by the apparent complexity of the task. If anything, the knick-knacks seemed to be enjoying the challenge, swarming over the hulking steel construction at full speed, some porting matter back and forth, others cleaning and polishing rough edges, while others produced and coated lengths of copper wire, handing them off to the winders who created tightly sandwiched bundles of copper the width of Calvin’s thigh. Still other knick-knacks measured every aspect of the motor repeatedly, with zero tolerance for deviation from the blueprint.

As the sun went down and the human workers grew tired from a long day of nailing the rails to the treated wood underneath, many of them stopped to admire the construction forming on the tracks.

“We’re gonna head home for the night,” Gunder said, approaching Calvin with a heavy iron mallet over his shoulder. “If we jog back, we can get back to Allast in time for bed.”

Gunder chewed his lip, glancing over the tracks. “I never would have thought this kind of speed was possible. Makes me all warm and fuzzy inside.”

“From the potential profits?” Calvin asked.

“What else? I was expecting to sit on this investment for over a year before anything came of it.” He glanced back the way they’d come. “We’re gonna have to start porting stuff out to the workers starting tomorrow. They’re going to be too far away from the city to get back to their own beds by tomorrow night.”

“That should be easy.” Calvin said, pointing at the train, where the Kncik-knacks were putting the finishing touches on the motor, connecting it’s shaft to the gearbox.

“We’re pioneering a way to transport large amounts of product. I don’t see why we couldn’t use the very same thing to help in its own construction.”

“Is it ready to use?” Gunder asked.

“Give it fifteen minutes, then one of you can be the first man to drive it.”

Fifteen minutes later, the Knick-knacks had assembled the basic skelton of a train. The walls were missing, and it was essentially a motor on a platform with wheels, but once they put up the siding, it would be a complete product.

It didn’t need walls to move, though, and so it was with great anticipation that every human present hopped aboard and waited for Gunder to get the machine moving.

The balding fat man slipped an oversized copper bracer onto his wrist, lined the studs on his palm up with the receivers on the motor, then unleashed a wave of lightning.

Nothing happened.

“Whoops,” Calvin muttered, going over to the gearbox and manually switching to the lowest possible gear.

“Try again.”

Another bolt of lighting shot out into the motor, and the entire train lurched forward, to a general shout of enthusiasm.

While everyone’s spirits were high, Calvin was panicking. I thought this was supposed to be reverse! They were inching forward with only a few hundred feet of track built in front of them.

Calvin ran forward before slamming the break lever down, then running over to the gearbox and putting the gear in forward.

A moment later he lifted the break and nodded for Gunder to continue.

A moment later, the entire train was moving backwards, slowly picking up speed until they were moving at the speed of a trotting Guar, the wind beginning to tickle through their hair.

At their fastest speed, some of the Juntai warriors were standing at the back of the train and screaming for the sheer joy of it.

They weren’t going faster than a trained Veteran could run, but they were carrying several tons of equipment like it was nothing, with the power of a single man.

Kala hugged Calvin across the chest as they began the smooth journey back to Allast, the only sound the train making was a soft clicking as the wheels went over the tiny gaps between individual rails.

“Your gearbox is backwards.” She said, nuzzling into his neck.

How was I supposed to know which pole was north and which was south? I can’t see the damn thing.

“Easy fix,” Calvin said. A moment later, a knick-knack crawled up and cut the stenciled ‘forward’ and ‘Backward’ off their respective positions above and below the lever, switching them and then welding them back in place. Problem solved.

Macronomicon

Good times.

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