kirabug's idea files

Day 501: the cart now travels from place to place on the rails I set using the power of red rock, some coal dust, some clay, and the occasional nudge by me as I climb in.

It’s good enough.

It’s nice to sit down and let something else move for a change.

It’s also nice that my cart is moving slowly enough that I’m not convinced I’m going to die any second, because I have absolutely no steering mechanism, seat belt, HANS device, or anything else to keep me from being splattered all over a hillside.

So now I’m wondering: do I build some indoors? Well, in-mine, anyway?

Day 500:

Earthwork on one end. Then three lengths of red-torch-powered golden rail. Then some regular rail, from here to the southern door (all of this being outdoors). Then some red-torch-powered golden rail again so that there’s power to send the cart back, and some more earthwork to keep the cart from flying off the rail at the other end.

Should be all set, right?

Well, upon applying cart to rail, the power worked — and the cart took off without me. It made it all the way to the other door, which was fantastic!  Except I wasn’t in it and now it was traveling far away from me and that was not the point of the exercise.

Then it bounced off the earthwork at the other end, hit the powered rail again, and sailed back to me… but before I could get in or stop it, it bounced off the earthwork, hit the powered rail again, and took off again.

By the time it was on its third trip I had un-powered the rail.

Back to the drawing board.

Day 499:

Making wire is annoying.

I gave up on it pretty fast.

Turns out a paste of red rock dust and just a pinch of clay works almost as well and does not involved me trying to roll thin bits of hot gold with a rolling pin.

Which as you imagine didn’t work out all that well.

But extruders are difficult to come by out here in the land of no power tools, and while I tried to get the duckens in my bedroom to yank on the two ends of a poorly-rolled chunk of gold, they were  having none of it.

So electrical paste it is. Now I just have to figure out how to make it at scale without getting shocked to death.

Day 498:

Remember when I said the other day that I might try burning the red rock to see what happens?

Ok, so my thinking was that the rock has a texture a lot like the coal I dig up – kind of porous and shiny, easily capturing oxygen and the like from the air.

And all my torches are pretty much giant matches – sticks with ground coal dust that i mixed with a very tiny amount of clay so they’d stick to the sticks, thus making torch like thingies.

(This also qualifies under my “this shouldn’t work like this, why won’t I just wake up already?” clause from the other day.)

So I thought “what the heck, let’s make torches out of the red rock too.”

(The fact that I’d accidentally gotten some of them mixed up together — the coal dust and the red rock dust i mean — might have something to do with this decision.)

Turns out the red rock does burn, and when it does, it shoots little sparks of electricity in all directions like one of those horrible science experiments from physics class where everyone’s hair stood on end even more than usual. (My physics class was in a low-g classroom.)

So that was painful.

But also revealing, because if I can make some wire I can probably capture the sparks and run them to the gold rails.