When they arrived at the docks, Tom gathered the men in a loading shed. He showed them his drawings and explained how his "sonar-blinding" setup would operate.
"Don't let the diagrams fool you. The basic idea is very simple. We absorb all sonar impulses that hit the ship and transmit them out the opposite side of the hull, instead of letting a ping bounce back and show up on the sonarscope of any hostile sub on the lookout for us."
Most of the job, he went on, would be tedious detail work. It would consist of attaching hundreds of mikes and speakers all over the hull to pick up and transmit the sonar pulses. The mikes would be receiving transducers and the speakers would be transmitting transducers.
"The leads from them," Tom ended, "will be centralized in a single electronic control unit inside the ship. I'll handle that part of it."
"Great idea, Tom!" Arv Hanson said admiringly.
"But what a job it'll be rigging those transducers," put in one of the technicians.
Tom nodded wryly. "You're right, Danny. If this experiment works out, though, I think I can lick that problem on future installations."
The young inventor explained that he hoped to find a way to mold the transducers into a continuous plastic sheet. This could be applied to the hull of a submarine in a single operation.
"But this time we'll have to do it the hard way," Tom added with an apologetic grin.
A jetmarine was hoisted into drydock and the work crew swarmed over it, rigging the transducers. Would his experiment succeed? Tom wondered. Hopefully, he set to work assembling the electronic control unit.