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Old 02-12-2019, 11:01 AM   #233
Icelander
 
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Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Iceland*
Default Re: Construction materials

Quote:
Originally Posted by johndallman View Post
You start by needing lots of bricks, especially firebricks for the ovens and kilns you need for burning all that coal. Some initial supplies, along with tools and cement for mortar, will need to be carried through.

Firebricks are made of several kinds of clay, depending on the usage: the usual kind has a preponderance of aluminium oxides over silicon oxides, but you need high-silicon clay for steel-making furnaces, and magnesium/chromium oxide clays for non-ferrous metallurgy.

More normal kinds of bricks are made of high-silicon clay but don't need to be fired so hot.

Moulding bricks is an interesting problem: the big machines that are used for mass production in the modern world won't be practical for the ASN at first, and they may well have to use slave labour for several years.

Cement is going to be Portland Cement, which is made by heating the right mixture of limestone and clay to high temperatures in a cement kiln, and then grinding the resulting lumpy material to a fine powder. The kiln can be coal-fired, which reduces the demand for coke.
That all sounds good.

Quote:
Originally Posted by johndallman View Post
The fineness of the grinding is important for the soundness of mortar and concrete made from the cement. A cement mill is a big steel cylinder, rotating at a few tens of rpm, with a lot of hard steel balls inside it. Modern ones are electrically powered, but for the ASN, a steam engine might be a better bet.
When in doubt, go with Steampunk Nazis.

Quote:
Originally Posted by johndallman View Post
As well as turning, you need fans to control air flow, because that's how you get the fine powder out, and you really don't want to breathe the powder. Cloth masks will be necessary for workers who are meant to live more than a few days.
Well, only for those workers performing duties that require an ability to learn new skills or the exercise of some individual initiative. The others... won't be living when they start, anyway.

Quote:
Originally Posted by johndallman View Post
A small cement mill can be taken through in pieces, along with the fans, controls, and small parts for larger ones. They're going to need several of these.
What kind of weight budget are we looking at there?

Quote:
Originally Posted by johndallman View Post
Something they need early on, and might forget, will be sanitation and water supplies. They'll have chlorine for disinfecting water, but they will need sewage farms, water-filtration systems, and loads of ceramic piping for local sewer systems.
Well, a significant part of the SS leadership that forms the majority of early ASN leaders will have extensive experience in building camps full of workers, in their thousands. And while some of them were not intended to avoid killing the workers, others were expected to turn a profit over years of economic activity. And, in all cases, the guard force was expected to avoid disease caused by the lack of waste disposal. For that matter, there will be people there who built underground bases with hundreds and even thousands of valuable German technical workers.

That being said, the massive population growth of the ASNs and their former slaves, current native-born citizens, will stretch any industry to the limits when it comes to building and upgrading sewers and the like. I'm betting that there are large areas of Jötunheim that smell even worse than Jötunheim normally does and that even in Germania Hyperborea, overflowing sewers and waterborne diseases are a common problem and a major political issue.

The hyper-focus on military technologies has always relegated civil engineering works to second place unless they have important military ramifications and sewer planning is decidedly not sexy. The ASN leadership no doubt demanded it be done and assigned it to experts who knew what they needed, but I'm sure that as the population grew by leaps and bounds, the support was always less than it should have been.
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Last edited by Icelander; 02-12-2019 at 11:09 AM.
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