Chapter 6

'Polack' took a deep breath as he punched up the holo of a ship's engine room with figurines placed at points about the diagram.

"We decided to look at a destroyer's engine space; we had to start somewhere and all ships are but a destroyer writ large".

He waved away McCock's raised eyebrows.

"We know that's not absolutely true Sir..."

"Aggy."

"Uh, Aggy, but as I said we had to start somewhere and small and simple we thought was better than jumping in on a BB's room."

McCock nodded agreement

"Show me how you are going".

Polack pushed another button and the figurines changed from holo blue to red or amber or green. At several points new half green / half blue figures appeared.

"The red are those we think we can either eliminate or combine with others. The amber are doubtful or combined. The green are the confirmed and the green/ blue new and confirmed."

There were only about twenty figurines in the holo. McCock asked,

"That's a normal steaming watch?"

After a few minutes he pointed at an isolated red figure at one end of the holo room.

"He appears to be a hold over from the merchant marine." said Polack "all he does is turn the valve wheel to control the flow of the flux from the fusion bottle and he does this in response to the annunciator at his position. The position seems wasted anyway on a senior NCO. We thought we would replace him with a motorized valve controlled from the command engineer's position."

"Have you worked that point?" McCock enquired.

"Not actually, I did my time on main impellers and sails."

Aggy went on

"That raised a number of points; bragging rights' time. Off on a tangent – standardized motors?"

"That's mine" said the brown skinned man eye to eye level with McCock, "I'm Weapons and as we started on the engine department first, they decided to keep me busy doing control motors because weapons use them too. I'm working on that and there are some very reliable commercial models available but we've got to decide how standardized we get and I've only scratched the surface on that one."

"Fail safe? What do you do if power is lost to the motor?"

McCock glanced around.

"Mine" said Denny "I got nothing to do anywhere in this being EW and we're basic anyway," to nods from the others, " I think I've got it taped. The axle of the valve, spindle or whatever will have a free square end. Having a free open end is a problem but can be made easily by economy of scale if it's fitted on all motors. Spanner end with lever arm, possibly a handle on the free end. I know (in response to a disbelieving grunt from Cowboy) space to swing it. Yeh, Yeh I'd want to make the "emergency spanners" (putting finger quotation marks in the air) standard throughout the ship."