No Step On Slime

Chapter 16: A Loose Cannon No Amount Of Muzzle Discipline Could Fix

My machine shop was near completion. I had given a general floor plan to the Orcs that were doing the construction, and they were following it really well.

I did my best to maximize the amount of floor space in the building. The machining tools were going to take up a ton of space, and I also needed room in case I do decide to upgrade and expand said tools.

In the rear was an indoor firing range. That particular part of the building was lined with bricks. The end of the firing range had a bullet trap in the form of a wall of sandbags.

I ensured that the firing range was airtight when it came to bullets. The last thing I wanted was for a misfired round to fly through the wall and hit somebody.

Until the machine shop was finished, I remained working with the Dwarves and Kurobe in the smithery.

"I'm looking to make a buncha different manufacturing processes," I said. "Currently we've got casting and forging, which you guys do."

Kurobe nodded. "Are you saying there are even more ways to manufacture with metal?"

"Yeah," I replied. "The third one is subtractive manufacturing, and we're currently making the tools to do that. Instead of hammering or casting metal into shapes, we have a block of metal that we cut into shape. Hence the drill presses, milling machines, and lathes."

"So that's what it's called," Kaijin said.

Additive machining would also be nice, but 3D printers are ridiculously far off. What would that require? Electricity, plastics, advanced robotics...

Yeah, there's no way.

"These metal sheets here are a demonstration," I said. "Once we make the right tools, it's easy to fabricate stuff outta 'em by stamping shapes of metal and shaping them by bending them."

"There's not enough room to cool these sheets," Kaijin pointed out. "I can see how making them like this could be useful, but we'll need a larger building to keep them in."

Yeah... a large building would probably require corrugated steel roofing and such, to keep weight down. Which would mean that we need more metal and additional room to make that material. Which, in turn, means that we need a literal fuckin' factory's worth of machining tools to do it.

Feels like I literally need to have a small industry behind me to actually make my firearms. But if it's a small industry I need, it's a small industry I will make.

"We can do it," I said. "The building issue is pretty much a non-problem, since the Orcs are helping us build the city up. And in the last meeting that Rim had with discussing internal affairs, he talked about how there was a job shortage, 'specially for the Orcs. We have a big amount but not a lotta stuff for them to do even with all the construction goin' on. So there won't be any labor shortage."

"You intend to teach them? That might take quite a long time."

"It's simpler than that," I replied. "You don't need to teach a thousand how to do everything, you allocate the jobs by splitting them up. Let me..."

I pulled the short sword out of my scabbard and used it as an example.

"Let's say we wanted to make a hundred thousand 'a these. Instead of teaching one thousand people how to make the whole sword, you give 'em jobs that make a small part of the sword, and assemble all the parts in the end."

"I see where you're getting at," Kurobe said. "It's a lot easier to teach someone how to be really good at doing one thing rather than trying to teach them how to do everything. But what about quality?"