hour of target practice. The explosion blew the roof of the turret over the mainmast so that it struck the base of the foremast, crushing one 37 mm gun and a steam cutter. The explosion killed 16 men and wounded another 15; 6 of these later died of their wounds. The badly damaged Sissoi Veliky headed to Toulon for repairs. Investigation revealed both mechanical and organizational causes of the accident. The chain of events, as it was reconstructed in Toulon, started with a failure of the hydraulic breech-locking mechanism of the left-hand gun. The turret crew then disabled the hydraulics and resorted to manual operation. The gunner responsible for closing and locking the breech failed to do so and the concussion of the right-hand gun firing unlocked it. The turret commander, ultimately responsible for checking the breech before firing, was too busy with calculating the firing solution and training the gun to be concerned with this matter. He delegated the checkup routine to an enlisted man, but this gunner had to attend his own station and was physically unable to look after the breech lock and attend to his own duties. The panel eventually dropped the charges against the captain and recommended introduction of mechanical fail-safe interlocks to prevent firing until the breech was properly locked. Sissoi Veliky was repaired by Forges et Chantiers de la Méditerranée. The French engineers openly ridiculed the quality of Russian workmanship manifested in a open seam between the belt armour and the ship's hull. This could have completely negated the battleship's protection if a shell had struck it. The Russian investigators reported a horrifying number of less obvious faults and deemed the ship unfit for sailing. The internal decks of the secondary armament casemates were particularly dangerous since their 152 mm shells easily fell through the cracks and holes in the deck. The Saint Petersburg admirals dismissed these concerns, arguing that the gap between armour plates was an inevitable feature of the design, and that the decks and other faults could be fixed by the crew "in their spare time". Far East After nine months in the dock at Toulon, the repaired Sissoi Veliky was assigned to Admiral Fyodor Dubasov's Far Eastern Squadron (Navarin, Sissoi Veliky, and the armoured cruisers and ) and sailed for the Far East. The British, alerted by the sudden movement of Russian battleships, dispatched the battleship to shadow the