Hello shadow,

During my time in the USN I had the fun experience of

tracing wiring on submarines, four of which I served as

a member of the crew, all of them built in the early 1960s

after at least a decade or three in service. There were

a lot of dead end cables had to be sorted through to find

the cable you where looking. Then there are the cables

that ran along the snorkel exhaust manifold that melted

the cable blocking the cable run and having to route

 a whole new cable that in theory was changed is the

boat's wiring guide. We had to use a different cable since

the original was no longer made.

Tom R

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From: "(via tml list)" <xxxxxx@simplelists.com>
To: "TML" <xxxxxx@simplelists.com>
Sent: Saturday, May 7, 2016 1:05:55 PM
Subject: [TML] Battle damage

This email was sent from shadowgard.com which does not allow forwarding of emails via email lists. Therefore the sender's email address (xxxxxx@shadowgard.com) has been replaced with a dummy one. The original message follows:

Just remembered a real world construction "oops" that could make
things interesting for the PCs.

They've take some damage from a fight aboard their new-to-them ship.
The engineer goes to repair a spot where some shots hit a major cable
run. He stares at what he finds and gets on the comm.

"Cap? I think I just found out why we got such as good deal on this
ship..."

"I don't like the sound of that at all. What's up?"

"I'm gonna need everyone who can run a circuit tracer to help on this
job. Y'know how the wires are supposed to be color coded and
labelled?"

The captain gets a sinking feeling. "What's wrong?"

"I removed the wall panel. Needed to do that to patch the holes
anyway. And I'm staring at a mess of wires. Oh, they're bundled
nicely, where they haven't been mangled by the shots that hit the
panel. and they are all the same shade of red with not a label in
sight..."

"All hands, this is  the Captain. anybody that can run a circuit
tracer report to the Engineer in ...."

Like I said, real world incident. Only they found out during the
acceptance trials for a new US Navy ship.

Opened a panel and saw a sea of red. With modern automated
construction setups you've got wire laying giozmos. Faster than
having people snake all the cables around. and the contractor had
gotten a deal of red wire.

Worse, somehow the requirement for color-coding either wasn't in the
contract or wasn't in the one the subcontractor had with the builder.

There was a long, drawn out fight over who exactly was going to pay
to re-wire the entire ship.

This may be merely annoying to the PCs if it was hijackers. If its
battle damage or there are pirates bearing down on them it's
practically a disaster.

You'll have to have a minimum of 3, more likely 4 people working on
the damaged run. Because you'll need to send a signal down each and
every broken wire  and have somebody find where it's coming out. Then
you label the broken end of that wire. When you start going thru the
same thing with the wires on the other side of the break, you can
start joining them up as you mind the "matching" wire.

This can take *hours*. And only so many people can be working at the
site of the break.

--
Leonard Erickson (aka shadow)
shadow at shadowgard dot com

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