It may be worth the town (Or some of its members) investing in producing either bullet molds or a reinforced bullet mold to speed up production of bullets. Without the use of a mold, it takes an engineer 1 lead, 1 arcanum, and 3 hours of work per bullet. With a regular bullet mold, 4 bullets could be produced for 1 iron, 4 lead, 5 Arcanum, and 6 hours of work. With a reinforced bullet mold, there’s a much higher up front cost (8 iron, 8 coal, 16 lead, 8 Arcanum, and 16 hours of work), but would let engineers produce bullets regularly at a rate of 4 lead, 4 Arcanum, and 3 hours of work for 4 bullets.
Jules answered this well. For convenience, at current market rates this adds up to:
1 bullet for 6.1 D
4 bullets for 22.4 D
4 bullets for 15.4 D, after an up-front cost of about 124.8 D (plus a 30 D schematic).
Note that using the regular bullet mold only nets you a savings of about 0.5 D per bullet, and an engineer might need to charge a bit more to cover the cost of the bullet mold schematic.
With the reusable mold the savings are much more significant: bullets produced with the reusable mold cost about 3.8 D each.
Bullets are great, but a sword that can hit just as hard and be used in every fight would be more cost effective. Ideally you would want both of coarse, sometimes you need the bullet.
I should be able to make something even better quite soon, though perhaps I should start working on a better gun, as people seem so fond of them.
Yes, double bladed sharpening mechanisms are very convenient, but they take a lot longer to re-prep, and also take electricity, which we should be careful about how much we’re utilizing.