Sniper 297 - excellent observations. As smart as they were (or thought they were), the "specialists" in BuOrd just seemed to let that elementary principle of physics get by them - if you have something hanging on the front end of your torpedo that's heavier than what originally used to be there, OF COURSE it's going to run deeper and compensation for the extra weight should have been added. Wonder what they were thinking?
We all know about the influence exploders and what a fiasco they were. Their multiple failures, plus those caused by the impact firing mechanisms, should have been grounds for at least a COI and possibly a court-martial. Those failures were costing lives. At the very least whoever was behind these problems, once made manifest, should have been relegated to something like running a backwater Navy installation in the middle of the Kansas prairie for the balance of WWII - then retired one-rank lower immediately after the war.
As I recall one of the Adms involved went from BuOrd to running the submarines out of, I think SOWESPAC where he used to give the captains who disabled the magnetic feature (and got hits, BTW) absolute hell in their patrol reports, even after a successful patrol, because they didn't use his pet feature. What a jerk. Wonder how many of them had their careers ruined by this guy and his devotion to his pet gizmo that should have been extensively tested pre-war, secrecy or no. I've got no sympathy at all for brass that pull stuff like this.
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