Chapter 46

Wally at "The Green Man" was informed of the planned course with the day's notice and after looking thoughtfully at McCock, turn his gaze skywards,

"And, why is it that I suspect the Navy yard brass will turn up. It might just have something to do with the fact that when we rubbed Joe Higgin's nose in it, we never gave him or his a demo. A little bird told me that Joe and his tech officers were a bit miffed and even more so when Wepdev put the thing under a blanket. Let me ask around, but you had better warn Captain Denholt, there'll be standing room only.

That fission pile start up only interested the greasers and the yardies; this is the sparkies and the command structures and the yardies, you mark my words."

Wally was spot on but was prepared for the mob. He had coffee and some light munchys to settle the morning hunger pains. After the lectures and demos started he provided more coffee and a bit of chewables to provide blood sugar to keep them alert. Lunch was smorgasbord around lighter cuts of meat and fish with fresh salad or crisp vegetables and more coffee. For the afternoon cheese and dry biscuits and of course more coffee.

The mob was broken up into tech and tactical.

After the introduction to the little black Holeinspace box Mk2, the techs were moved to the gym where Denny led them through the procedures for securing the box in place and the test procedures. Despite there being no reported failures, (Denny pointed out that in fact there were only about twenty of the boxes in warships as opposed to in boats, and of those, ten, no eleven! Bender still had his in "Mountserrat", were in RMN), the possible failure points were ... and then discussed the first actions on breakdown. Over the previous months R1 sparkies had compiled a manual for users, ship board repairers and workshop level repair and the chip was available for copying. The electrical engineers, and some of them had hidden their expertise to get into space, required more detailed information which, as developer, Denny was able to provide.

In the dining hall, Slow was lecturing on the tactical procedures and pointed out that velocities above three fifty using the equipment had not been trialled. She covered the operations in which Holeinspace had been used and except for the Helena sortie in a smaller vessel, all the velocities had been at fast convoy velocity. This led to a short discussion on "Shriek". The hit on the first "Vector" and its subsequent loss here were dissected critically. This led naturally onto a plan put forward by Cheryl Forbes and discussed by all ranks present to divide the BCs into two groups to explore the parameters using fast heavy ships of the line. Denny was told he would be the expert on the flagship and Slow actually volunteered to accompany the op force.

Similarly the afternoon was spent working on Period.

Being the typical pessimists all spacers are, there was some fairly intensive whining requests for spare sets. Slow and Denny had predicted this but made the beggars work for them.

Arrangements were made for Slow and Denny to join their vessels at first light the next day. As Sir Crypian explained

"Joe Higgins had just over an hour's warning of that raid here; so I want to be at one hour's notice to be able to do something more than Joe could do, and by Diety, I will be even if I have to stand over my techos with a lash all night."

This cracked grins over the techos faces. They were in the same boat so there was no need for encouragement. In fact, the sets were in place and testing and experimenting had gone on all through the night watches.

Upon return to "Vector", Slow warned her Boat Bay of the detail to take Captain Denholt and herself across to HMSs "Illustrious" and "Invincible". As latrine rumours are wont to do on ships, the word flitted around reaching the ears of fly ops by the end of last dog. By middle First Felix and Algy were having a very polite argument as to who was going to captain "Shriek". By end of First, Admiral commanding 3rd BC Squadron found himself about to be involved in a rather larger exercise than initially envisaged with "Shriek" under Cdr F Arburthson and twenty one HACs under Lt (prov LtCdr) A Hardman joining in the fun(?).

Captain (jg) Harold Harwood, RMN, 3rd BC Sqdn's hard worked Chief of staff, never worked harder than he did between end of First and just into Morning to develop the planned scenarios to test the parameters of the equipment. As the exercises were getting underway at first nautical twilight, Harwood was gratefully collapsing into his bunk. Had a battle been in the offing, he would have been still on his feet to serve his Admiral; but as it was a planned lock step gavotte of extended length, his Admiral accepted that Harwood could catch up on the results by studying the after action reports. Because of the intensiveness of the scrutiny Harwood had to apply to his studies, he became one of the experts in the use of the equipment for the Squadron.

The clearest result was that at high velocities, the larger vessels were capable of being detected at energy ranges by highly trained personnel who were familiar with the concept of looking for a hole and not just looking at a hole. Down at convoy velocities the ranges for detection decreased- so the sneaky beaky — low and slow — still held. EW personnel creamed themselves at the results with Period. 3rd's staff developed a technique which promised to be highly effective; when in any sort of formation, each vessel could scan intermittently spreading the source of emissions and the scan result would be data transmitted to its sister ships by tight beam com in real time.