Spending My Retirement In A Game

"I see, I'll talk to her later and have her show it to me. What about the iron from the Giants' Country?"

"They apparently started the preparation and ore refinement for the quality of iron you asked for. In two weeks the first part of the shipment should arrive," Constant explained, curiously looking up at the old man, "What is it that you want to build with that anyway?"

Eisen thought about it for a moment, and then looked at the core helper for a few moments, "Have I ever explained to you what a train is?"

"A train? Does it have something to do with becoming stronger for the upcoming battles?"

The old man laughed slightly as he shook his head, "No, not 'training'. A train is... something like a large, automated minecart. We will construct rails across the islands and our country as a whole, and on those rails, we will put a train. The train will pull a number of carriages on those rails as well that we can use to quickly transport materials, items, as well as people."

Constant's eyes widened slightly, "Oh, I see! That sounds really interesting! I can't wait to-"

The core helper soon stopped himself in the middle of the sentence, realizing that what he was about to say would never come true. He would never be able to see the train in action; Constant's movement was fully restrained to this part of the gardens.

"Don't worry," Eisen smiled lightly, "I'll figure out a way to let you see the train once it's finished."

The old man walked back out of the workshop while rubbing his hand through Constant's metallic hair. Once outside the workshop, Eisen made his way to the open area right behind the building. There, he quickly got started working out the design for the train's locomotive.

Generally, it was fairly simple. There were four main parts that he needed. The magic engine, a large mana battery, the cab, and of course the actual wheels. The magic engine and mana battery were, of course, quite simple. The base engine design was enlarged, and with the extra space was given more cylinders instead of simply increasing the cylinders' volume, so that he could maximize the efficiency.

The battery was simple as well, as it was really just a large mana crystal that was enchanted in a way so that it could hold as much mana as possible without any losses.

Now, Eisen moved on to the most complicated part, the cab. In here, the driver would be seated and actually take control of the whole room. In the beginning, it should be possible to assign some golems to this, but later, Eisen did want actual individuals to take on the role after getting the proper training that they needed.

Quickly, the old man started to create a 'blueprint' of the dashboard, to figure out every part that he needed to add for the driver. Of course, ever since Eisen started trying to use his abilities without the system's assistance, he no longer used the system window to draw this blueprint on, but mentally created it.

Generally, it was a much quicker process, since Eisen had exact visions of what he needed.

Very importantly, there were the speed, the current amount of MP left in the battery, a few other values in order to track the current state of the motor like the temperature.

This would be displayed very easily by using some enchantments that actually tracked every part of this across the motor and the train as a whole, and would then translate that to a relative rotation so that an arrow could be pointed at the right value on a round dial. This way, it would be easy enough to figure out all the values at a glance without having to even fully register the actual number.

And then, Eisen was also going to add a lever that the driver would actually use to actually accelerate and decelerate. On top of that, they would need emergency and parking breaks, a way to control the lights, a horn, something like windshield wipers would also be a necessary edition to ensure overall visibility.

Beside that, Eisen also wanted to add a system that tracked the overall health of the whole train, so that if there were damages in the wheels, the batteries, the gears, or any other part of the train, a signal would be given to the driver so that they could respond accordingly.

Not to mention, all of this were only the utmost basic parts of the cab; the driver would also need ways to interact with all the carriages that could be connected. An intercom system, a way to open and close the doors automatically, as well as something to control the temperature and lighting inside of the cabins.

Depending on the specific type of carriage, additional functions might need to be added, especially if it came to moving very specific materials or monsters that needed special containment methods, so what Eisen opted for was a more adaptive system. This part, different to the other hard-installs that would be put in in the form of physical buttons, dials, and levers, would be a digital panel.

In order to decrease the amount of mana that it would take, instead of creating a faux system-window, Eisen would have the information displayed on a physical crystal screen that the driver could interact with. Inside of the actual carriages, information for what functions the driver needed access to would be added to this panel.

That way, it would be very easy to swap out or add carriages to a train no matter what the model of the locomotive was.

And now that the cab was done, Eisen could move on to the wheels. This was a fairly simple part compared to the cab, especially since most of it was going to be the exact same as a real trains. After figuring out how to connect the axis of these wheels with the gearbox that would be placed above, Eisen really only needed to fine tune the wheels themselves.

So that they could adjust to the curves of the rails properly without derailing all the time, the part of the wheel facing outward was a slight bit smaller than the part facing inward. As if the wheels were a long cone and you removed all the parts that would never come to touch the rails anyway. This way, the wheels would be slightly pushed around to properly adjust to the curves.

And within the actual wheels, Eisen added some other things. He enchanted them to improve the adhesion to the rails.

Usually, he would place something like this on the outside of a wheel, but until now he really only worked with carriages whose wheels would be inspected regularly for damages anyway.

For a train like this, it would be much too risky to allow the enchantments to actually touch the rail directly, so that they could avoid the metal being worn down to a point where the enchantment was damaged to a point of critical failure, which could destroy the whole wheel in the process.

So, instead, though it would decrease the efficiency a bit, Eisen placed the enchantment further within the wheel. It really wasn't much; just a very simple conceptual enchantment that would stop the wheels from potentially sliding over the rails, especially if they were wet or, even worse, frozen. Other trains often carried sand for this, which Eisen would also supply just in case.

If the wheels started sliding over the rails instead of properly gripping them, stopping the train from starting its journey, the sand would be placed onto the rails to provide something for the wheels to actually grip onto for the beginning of the journey.

It wasn't needed that often, and especially with the enchantment it was highly unlikely, but it was better to be prepared for things like this beforehand rather than have to improvise a solution if a moment like this occurred later on.

But with that, Eisen was done planning out the mechanics of the locomotive, and was now ready to begin the actual construction of the most basic prototype.