[BITList] Static, etc

[HUGH]

Frank,

I'll leave the highways and byways around Hull to you and Colin. All I recall of Hull is sitting in a dockside pub one day - might have been Nowshera - amid a crowd of dockers, all with eyes fixed on Watch With Mother.  "Are you sitting comfortably?" asked the BBC lady. "Yes," came the chorus.  What caught my eye was your reference to static build up on an MTB and the means of lessening it. It triggered off the following.

When Scotts were building HMS Newton (URV 01), I was engaged on the design of her.  Her role was underwater noise research, and there was an endless list of the ways in which silence could and should be achieved.  However, one feature that has stuck in my mind could have had nothing to do with noise. As you will know, el cables in a merchant ship are pulled in at an early stage, and the main runs in the machinery spaces are determined (at least in my experience) by the engine drawing office.  Based on this, lines of angles are/were welded toe-on to deckheads and bulkheads to establish the runs, and perforated plate applied to take the cables.  The Newton was no different, but in the Propulsion Generator Room the only route available for cables was along the shipside, and the MOD required that the phases be run in a certain relationship to each other in these areas, P & S, for reasons to do with degaussing.  So a transition had to be schemed out to take the cables from the relationship they were in leaving the generators, to the other one, over a very short length.  There was a 1:5, problem-solving,  model of the area already made, so we (George the patternmaker and I) managed it using cable that was near enough 1:5, with different colours for different phases.  She's presently alongside in the Great Harbour, Greenock, while her future is worked out.  A group of us are trying to arrange a visit, this being the 300th Anniversary of Scotts.

Hugh.
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