While I was waiting for construction of the facility to house a large, adjustable fractionating column on Drazvok, I was approached by the dwarf I put in charge of the automobile club and hiring graduates for our own related programs, which for the past few years has been working on improving tanks. They'd made enough revisions and changes to the old tank platform that they want to finalize the new design and put it into production. Upon reviewing the design however, I realized we have a small problem.

Their design was fine, in fact, it was quite a bit better than fine, the problem was that it doesn't integrate any of the other military research work that has occurred for turret designs and engines related to aircraft and ships. In essence, while the improved tank platform is miles better than the old one, portions of it are heavily outdated. What we need is military research design coordination. We need designated liaisons on projects who's sole job is overviewing existing designs and relaying relevant improvements from other research into these new designs.

For the time being, I've directed them to review the new turret improvements and engine efficiencies, and integrate them into a new design for our tanks. It'll probably take them some time to do so, but the final product will be significantly better as a result. Since I had left tank development to their own devices previously, this served as a valuable comparison against the ship and airplane design which I coordinated. I knew of the improvements to different technologies and redirected research resources between the two projects previously, without being heavily conscious of the fact that I was doing so.

Now, it's obvious that if I want to take a more backseat role, I need someone to fill those shoes, and given how I'm still expanding military research, it'll probably need to be a whole team of people. I'm going to bring it up at the next minister's meeting, and we can decide if an entire new minister is needed, or if it should technically fall into a subcategory of the existing organizational structure. I personally think we should have a new minister for research coordination. Considering that I hope that after this cold war is resolved we'll revert to more civilian research goals, I'm going to push that they're just generally in charge of research coordination, and not be military specialized. We'll need a minister of the air force in the near future additionally, so I want to be careful not to have too many military factions weighing in in the minister's meetings.

Things got quite complicated at the ministers meeting. Basically, the concern is that there are going to be too many ministers soon. Every minister we add means that our meetings get longer and longer, and that there are more minute perspectives that are being presented which may have less impact on the topics being discussed. So we ended up having about a dozen meetings discussing new ways to structure things.

While we're keeping the same ministers, we've separated out different departments, of which a representative can be selected to go to the main ministers meetings. For example, since we'll soon have three military ministers, they can have their own meetings with Zaka related directly to military matters, but they'll just send one of themselves to be present at the main ministers meetings. Similar groupings were decided upon for the other ministers. Civilian industries were grouped together, natural resources, and the new research coordination minister was grouped with bureaucracy and myself. That means we'll be going back down to only a handful of individuals present in major ministers meetings, with fewer of such meetings being scheduled. We'll see how it goes over time.

Construction is finally completed on my fractionating column, so I'm excited to give it a go in the next week, we're close to the end of the semester now. I've been collecting wood tar while I waited for it to be completed, since I'm going to need a lot to tune the testing. Similarly, we've purchased a large amount of the waterproofing material from the dwarves to try as well, though I'm going to attempt to tune the column using our wood tar, since we don't have to import it. The column itself is exceptionally tall, standing at 80 feet and made of steel. This is necessary since I plan on having a wide temperature range, and I want to be able to ensure good separations.

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After I find good temperatures to do separations at, I'll have to tune steam cracking to make what I want as well. The process itself is relatively simple, you flash heat hydrocarbons for a very short amount of time, then quench them, to break them into smaller components. The temperature and duration of heating often determines your output, based on your input. As such, I'll probably end up needing multiple testing vessels alongside having other individuals run precision tests and test the outputs.

Some of the outputs will likely be quite toxic, so we'll have to take a lot of care in what we're doing. Based on everything I've observed of our demons, other than the goblin who died of radiation poisoning, I haven't really observed demons getting cancer, which is a major risk of working around benzene and some other hydrocarbon products. I did some asking around, and it does seem like some humanoids die of cancer. Given how our entire demon physiology changes on evolution, that might hold the key to our cancer resistance. In theory, myself, Zaka, and any other older demons that are leveling very slowly might become susceptible to it over time.

With that in mind, I plan on having demons that are a few years from reaching their next evolution be the ones to do this work. I still plan on having plenty of safety measures in place, but that should be an extra layer of safety, even if they are accidentally exposed to it. It's unfortunate this is taking as long as it is, because the failure of success of this project will change the direction of aircraft research, and could drastically improve the functionality of various mechanical devices.

It took a bit of tuning to get the kind of separations that I wanted over the course of a few weeks, but I managed to get what I wanted by the end of the semester. I decided to double up on the work by doing presentations of tuning a separations process for engineering students. What I found worked best for what I wanted was to heat the bottoms, in the absence of oxygen, to about 800 degrees, and let the tops be cooled down to about room temperature.

What I found at that temperature was that the bottom was filled with very heavy carbon chains that, when cooled, were practically solid. Not counting the light gases we pulled off by putting the wood tar under a vacuum, the heavy carbon residue made up about 85% of the wood tar, with the remaining amount being the lighter fluid we were interested in recovering and refining. Though the heavy pitch has it's own uses. Compared to the mainland waterproofing material, it actually seems to outperform it for the purposes of waterproofing in both durability and water repellant properties.

When I submitted the mainland's waterproofing material to the same process of pulling a vacuum, then heating it and separating it, it produced only a quarter of the light gases from the vacuum, and only half as much of the lighter fluid from the top. Basically, it's naturally comprised of more long chains. The bottoms from this section performed even better for the purposes of waterproofing, however, so I assume that it's more than just different compositional lengths, and that the contained organic chains play a role as well.

I got a good question from one of the engineering students when I told them that I planned on steam cracking the tops into smaller components. They asked why the steam is necessary, and why I don't just heat the material itself without the steam. The reason for this is that I don't want carbon chains to interact with each other while being heated. You could achieve this by pulling a strong vacuum and processing it in that way, but the steam functions similarly.

By having a bunch of water molecules in the reactor, the partial pressure of the carbon atoms is as low as the vacuum itself would have been. Since the water should minimally react with the carbon chains, since it'd be energetically unfavorable, it's a lot easier to operate it with steam than under a strong vacuum. The real problem I'm going to have is the fine tuning of the time in the heater vessel, and quickly quenching the material. We only want to heat the gas for a fraction of a second, and we need to be able to finely control that fraction. Since I was able to separate out what I assume are medium length hydrocarbons, it is worth pursuing the next step to attempt to recover small aromatic carbon rings like benzene, toluene and xylene after cracking.

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