Any secret made public was no secret at all. Stockpiling ordinary strategic supplies and slapping on a label saying they were for aid to Austria was one thing, but there was simply no way to keep behemoths like warships secret.
Finding some secluded harbor and producing them in secret was an even bigger joke. Times had changed. Modern battleships displaced tens of thousands of tons at the drop of a hat, requiring vast amounts of manpower and material resources.
Unless the Holy Roman Empire shut itself off from the world, once the normal flow of goods reached a certain scale, secrecy became impossible.
Keeping things hidden and tucked away was the thinking of children. In reality, it simply could not be done.
The era of free trade accelerated the circulation of goods and capital, while also creating favorable conditions for spies to infiltrate.
Ever since Austria and the Holy Roman Empire signed their naval agreement, the Holy Roman Empire's major shipyards had become a prime focus for spies.
Naturally, they could not simply walk in and inspect the place. Spies stupid enough to do that had been eliminated back in the last century.
Nowadays, everyone had learned to probe from the sidelines. For example, they could count the workers entering and leaving a shipyard each day, track transport vehicles, and analyze fluctuations in raw-material prices to draw conclusions.
The accuracy went without saying—it was scarcely better than guessing riddles. Raw materials might have been delivered inside, but what they were actually used for was beyond the outside world's knowledge.
Shipyards did not build only warships; they also built merchant vessels. Even if they were building warships, it was still impossible to determine what class of warship was being constructed.
Britain had not made mistaken judgments due to faulty intelligence merely