Originally Posted by propbeanie
Hello takoyaki, and welcome to SubSim!
The Kate plane in the game does not fly very well, nor does it like certain situations while flying. You'll have to experiment, maybe with individual planes and their routes in, as they make their approaches, with multiple WayPoints for height and directional changes. I cannot find my research notes right now, and someone hopefully will come along and correct any errors, but it seems to me that 50 meters was the ideal height for the SH4 Kate to launch its torpedo from, but it may also have been 30 meters... Experiment with that for some better launching runs. If you get too low though, it's like gravity takes over and they fly into the surface. Either way, after the launch, the planes will sometimes climb too fast, and end up "stalling" and falling back to earth, crashing. Speed is another factor, and I also cannot remember the best speed to approach with. The slower, the better, but again, the Kate does not fly so well in the game, and will suddenly crash if you set this too slow. You'll see them "wobble" from trying to "target" and avoid countermeasures, but they will also wobble just before crashing... Also, make sure the "Loadout" of the plane is what you want / need.
As for the torpedoes themselves, it depends upon which mod you are working with. In Fall of the Rising Sun Ultimate, you would look in "Air_Torpedo_JP.dat" and corresponding SIM files in the Library folder, with there being a "depth" setting in the SIM file under "amun_AirTorpedo", which is set to "depth=5.0" - I have no idea if that is "feet", "yards" or "meters". If I'm looking at things correctly, the "Stock" Kate uses the "SH_Torpedo_Mk13" as its weapon, which is the "Torpedo_Air_US.dat" and SIM files in the Library folder, with a similar structure as the FotRSU version. You will also find its "depth=5.0"...
Hopefully, someone with more / better concise material will come along shortly. As a little side-note, the Japanese put wooden "wings" on top of the torpedoes' fins, to slow down their entry into the water, so that they wouldn't "dive" too deep from the gravity of the drop. It did work for the most part. They also followed very closely a plan laid out by a US Naval officer (Reservist??) from a few years before, who was tasked with finding "weaknesses" in USN defenses...
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