How the fuel worked
A Vulcan could not fly to the Falklands and back on the fuel in its tanks. Full stop. The Black Buck raids were therefore a Victor problem that happened to end with a Vulcan over a runway. Each successful bomber night required a package of Handley Page Victor K.2 tankers refuelling each other so that enough fuel existed in the right piece of sky at the right minute. The bomber was the visible end of a chain. The chain was the campaign.
Start with a tanker taking off from Ascension. It fills another tanker. That one fills another. Somewhere in the middle of the South Atlantic a Vulcan needs a drink, then another, then enough to come home. The geometry is a nightmare on a whiteboard and worse in weather, at night, with a probe and a basket and a crew who have already been awake too long. When a tanker went unserviceable, or a transfer failed, or the fuel simply was not where the plan said it would be, the bomber turned around. That is why sorties were cancelled. Not because crews lost their nerve.
After the war, the delta as a petrol station
The Victor force was wrung out by the operation. After the fighting, a handful of Vulcans were themselves converted to K.2 tankers and flown by No. 50 Squadron until 1984 — a stopgap, undignified, and useful. The type that had spent thirty years being a bomber finished as a flying petrol station because Britain still needed hoses and the crescent-wing experts were tired. If you tell the 1982 story as a single heroic bomber, you are telling the wrong story. Tell it as logistics that barely held, with a radar-aimed stick of bombs at the far end, and you are closer.
The public memory prefers XM607 and a crater. Fair enough: that is the photograph. This page exists so the Victors do not vanish from the sentence. For the night itself, One crater. For why Britain even had a tanker force of Victors, go back to the Valiant's spar and the three V-bombers.