News Update: Shipyard Explosion

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Grant Eisen tonight, siting in for Janeth DeVries.

Our top story today is the explosion of the RINS Ballota, one of the first of a new class of survey ships scheduled to be brought into service with the Ibizan Navy. The Tede-Class is a replacement for the older Loupe-Class first put into service some eight years ago. The Tede was to be the demonstration of a series of new production and assembly techniques as well as upgraded sensors and crew stations.

According to reports the RINS Ballota was conducting system integration tests just a few days before it was scheduled to embark the majority of its crew. This disaster was the first of its kind for Trestrellas Yards, and investigators and engineers are scrambling to identify the cause.

One of the biggest differences between Tede and its predecessors is the source of parts. Ibizan industrial concerns are only now finding their footing after the economic aftershocks of the Binary War. Unlike other states, the Ibizan economy did not weather the transition to a peacetime economy. The capacity for building new and advanced components that a navy requires had atrophied quickly. As a result, the Royal Navy made a decision to purchase many non-critical systems from outside providers.

According to previously disclosed corporate filings, Itter Fusion Solutions were the suppliers of the Ballota’s primary power plant, as well as its secondary and emergency APU systems. Other subsystems were provided by Subach: Witzig and Rolf Innez Solutions. The command and control systems as well as core network infrastructure was manufactured in the Krak University States by the College of ElectroComputing. Life support, survey systems and the ship’s main engines were all provided by the traditional suppliers of the Ibizan Royal Navy.

With such a diverse source of components, the question on everyone’s mind is: What failed? Representatives from Itter have already stated that their fusion plant designs feature multiple fail safes with a proven design with decades of service. At the same time they concede that the evidence clearly shows a catastrophic containment failure that appears to originate from the ship’s engineering spaces. So was it a production flaw, a control failure, or operator error?

Itter has stated they are fully cooperating with the Ibizan Royal Navy’s investigation, in addition to running their own independent accident analysis team. PackMaster Hella Kobetsky had this to say:

“We of course feel a great deal of sympathy for our colleagues in the Ibizan Navy. However, shipyards are dangerous places and even with the best safety controls accidents can, and will happen. Speaking for the deWulf Navy, we are confident of our Itter Fusion reactors. They have been the backbone of our power generation systems since the First Contact War, and absent concrete evidence of a fault we have no plans to change.”

PackMaster Hella Kobetsky – Yards & Docks Bureau