When you're an arms supplier to Her Majesty's government, you get put under pretty severe auditing requirements, which means tracking down special auditors to do the auditing. There's actually only 3 places you can go. One is a department within one of the big accounting firms. The other 2 are run by former forensic accountants from GCHQ.
And one of those wasn't very good at securing their databases. Which meant that the handling of all of the prototypes for Project Cork was in the hands of the Malaysians, because when you keep all the receipts, they tell a story.
Picking through, they'd traced the story of each of the control electronics subsystem prototypes they could identify. There were 7. 4 of them recieved cases. 3 had had the final firmware on them. Only one had went to a full assembly for compliance testing. The other two had been tested against a subset of the specification to see what the final assembly might need to compensate against.
It was all fairly standard milspec electronics plugged together. Nothing was what could be called modern or state of the art. It had redundancy against any part failing, the firmware was stored in multiple places and could be verified correct before loading, all the volatile storage was proofed against stray radiation flipping bits and causing programs to go wrong. Everything was incredibly conservatively specced. It was meant to last 10 years on its battery. It would probably do 25.
Its whole development, through to delivery to the Navy, visible in a web of receipts, of hours billed for tasks, courier fees and machining orders. And it told them where one part had went missing, maybe.
It had went to a vibration testing company, which did have a slightly special setup, able to vary the assemblies temperature while it was shaken, quite violently, and give shocks of different temperature extremes. Unfortunately, that sort of real world test was dropped from the milspecs later on, making this some of the last hardware ever to require it. Simulation would do the job from here on. This control subsystem had been left behind there though. There was the courier there, the test, the test results, but no courier back.
It wasn't much to go on. But if they still had the hardware, it meant that there was a good chance that the canonical interpretation of the control system was in the firmware on that circuitboard. In triplicate.