kirabug's idea files

Day 497:

Did some fishing and pet some duckens and rested my weary head for the day. Sometimes I get stuck on a problem and this is the best way to fix it that won’t get me blown to the next asteroid belt.

Day 496:

So it turns out I can build a small length of golden rail, a longer length of plain rail, and another small length of golden rail, with a nice earthworks at each end to keep the cart on the rails. And if I reach down and whack the red rock it’ll get me from one end to the other

So now I’m trying to figure out how I can do it without whacking things with a hammer because, well, that’s more work than I want to do having spent all day with a pickaxe to begin with.

I haven’t tried applying fire to the red rock yet but I might experiment…

Day 495:

Figured out the right ratio of red rock to cart after multiple experiments, most of which involved blowing the cart so far down the rails so fast that it took me an hour to pick up the pieces.

Also, carts: not as durable as I thought.

Glad I already made helmets because I’d be making them now otherwise.

Day 494:

After a day and a half of experimentation, I got just enough shock out of a pile of scary red rock to get my cart to work.

To be honest, there’s something about all of this — I don’t remember electrical physics very well but I do feel like there was supposed to be more to it than this.

Maybe it’s the other day’s shock wearing on me, but when things like this go well, and they shockingly do on occasion, instead of being happy about it I get suspicious, like maybe this is all a fever dream and I’m hallucinating that I’m competent with electricity.

Heck, for all I know the shock I took might’ve been someone jolting my heart back to life in “the real world”.

Or maybe it was just me being pessimistic. Hard to tell.

But the wheels work, sort of, and that’s good enough for me today — at least until I wake up from this hells cape and find out I’m still in high school or something.

Day 493:

I’ve made wheels with the typical divot in the middle to ride on my rails, because there’s no point in repeating the past if you’re not going to learn from it. I make them in two pieces and then weld them together using my patented “pour hot metal on one pieces and very very carefully set the other on top of it” welding technique.

If there were more of me I’d say we’d invent welding torches in a few generations, but chances are that I’m either saved or dead before I get around to acetylene.

Anyway, it’s a far sight harder to get wheels to balance and roll evenly than anything our childhood toy sets let on, let me tell you.

(Not that my generation had a lot of toys with wheels to begin with. Mostly antigravity platforms and stuff like that. Flying transports. But my grandfather kept his grandfather’s toys in good repair, so unlike some of my classmates I at least knew what a wheel was when I saw one.)