Chapter 544: LBM Mark 1

Industrialization, mechanization, and eventually automation didn’t just increase the demand a society had for raw resources, it also provided methods to extract and process those resources.

The key to maintaining stability was being able to balance these two aspects so that, over time, costs came down while supply continued to increase.

In the other universe, according to Lucas’ inherited memories, several hundred years ago, an economic state called ’abundance’ had been reached by society. Essentially, resource extraction and manufacturing technology had become so advanced and so efficient that no one ever needed to worry about not having enough.

Eventually, it got to the point that everything anyone could ever want, in as large a quantity as they could ever want it, was available to them at the snap of their fingers for practically no cost whatsoever.

Ironically enough, that kind of unlimited availability created its own set of problems, which ultimately resulted in the government needing to take steps to curb the ’level’ of abundance in their society.

Still, as an aspirational goal, abundance wasn’t a bad to aim for; after all, the issues of having it were far better than the issues of not having it.

Of course, Lucas and the Rockwell Kingdom were absolutely nowhere near ready to begin even thinking about such things, but the boy could definitely get the process started while hopefully, knowing what pitfalls awaited him along this road, avoid some of the growing pains which came with it.

His first step?

The introduction of the steam engine to the Rockwell Kingdom.

There was a limit to how many blacksmiths could work in a single forge, labourers could toil away in workshops, or waterwheels you could install along a single river to power various tools. These limits put a hard cap on production capabilities in all sorts or production professions, but functional steam engines could shatter those restrictions.

Since he broke through to the Second Step Sea Establishment Realm and gained more access to his inherited memories some 18 months ago, Lucas had been planning out how to introduce this critical piece of technology to the world. Back in Redwood Town, however, his ability to do so was extremely limited.

Originally, Lucas had thought it would take him 10 or more years to reach a point where he could build a prototype steam engine, then perhaps another 2 or 3 years of testing and experimenting before actually creating a truly functional model that he could get useful work out of.

Becoming Celestina’s First Disciple and gaining access to the Balfour Family’s resources had greatly sped up that timeline.

That, in no way, meant Lucas thought the circumstances which had led to him becoming Celestina’s Disciple were a good thing.

If he were to be given the option to exchange his current status for having his parents back, Lucas would make that trade in a heartbeat, to say nothing of all the lives that had been lost and the suffering countless others had been forced to endure during the explosion crisis.

However, the situation was the situation, and if Lucas wanted to reunite with his family and prevent such tragedies from happening in the future, he figured the best way to do so was to use his unique knowledge to strengthen both himself and the Rockwell Kingdom.

Lucas had been taught at multiple points during that crisis that personal strength would always matter, but that hadn’t changed his overall mindset that in the grand scheme of things, it was the strength of a civilization as a whole that determined whether it would survive or not.

In any case, after many months of lab experiments, field testing of early prototypes, and over 100 explosions that resulted in many injuries to many of Project Revolution’s development team, Lucas, Braxton, and Marco had finally managed to complete their design for the first-generation production model steam engine which they affectionally named the LBM Mark 1 Steam Engine.

Creative, right?

None of the trio were particularly good at naming things, so they all decided that keeping it simple was the best option. That lead to them taking the first initial from each of their names then tacking on the engine’s model number.

Setting aside the trio of explosion enthusiasts lack of naming sense, after reaching optimum pressure and temperature in its steam chamber, the Mark 1 took about half-a-minute to accelerate a 2-ton hoop-style flywheel up 200 RPM and could maintain that speed for a good 5 or 6 hours or so before needing to be shut down and resupplied with water.

Such performance, Lucas calculated, gave the LBM Mark 1 an overall power output of around 6 kilowatts.

According to the thermodynamics knowledge from his inherited memories, which Lucas would openly admit was still quite spotty, this meant that the LBM’s actually thermal efficiency, its ability to convert heat into usable work, was a dismal 3%.

If that wasn’t bad enough, a 6 kW steam engine was actually pretty weak, nowhere near enough to run a train or power a paddle-steamer with, much less something bigger like an ocean-going ship, but that didn’t discourage Lucas and the others working on Project Revolution.

No matter how weak and inefficient it was, this 6 kW steam engine was still more than powerful enough to replace the labour of 30 to 40 strong, healthy Body Tempering Practitioners with nothing more than some iron, charcoal, and a bit of water.

The problems were many.

The horizontal piston wasn’t perfectly air-tight, the seams on the boiler leaked at high pressures, the cam-shaft scrapped if it wasn’t lubricated frequently enough, and so on and so forth, but even with all of these flaws, this first production model steam engine was a marvel of engineering and ingenuity that the whole Project Revolution team was extremely proud of.

And it truly had been a team effort.

Each of the lead designers was confident that they could have come up with a complete design for the LBM 1 on their own given enough time, but Lucas, Braxton, and Marco working on it together had massively shrunk compressed the development period necessary to take the steam engine from a mere concept to a working machine.