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Originally Posted by PurpleCow
So does that mean the US Navy never developed a torpedo like the fictional "Sea Lance"? If this is the case why was it canceled? Seems like a great long distance weapon to me as torps can be rather slow.
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Couple of reasons but basically what it comes down to is that Sea-Lance (which was also having some development problems) was considered an un-necessary luxury. Also, much like any other submarine launched missile, you have to be careful where you're launching this thing because anybody on the surface in range to see it is going to know where you are.
Finally (and this is one of the reasons that a conventional SUBROC was never done) there's the issue of fire-control over long range (although obviously newer sonars are probably quite a bit better). With SUBROC, it was essentially required that your last step before launching the missile was to emit a single active ping to determine range (and likely give away your position in the process). For the Nuclear depth charge, this wasn't really viewed as too much of an issue, because the other submarine would have about 2 minutes to move outside of the 5 nm kill radius of the blast (he probably wouldn't make it) but for a torpedo (especially the Mk 44 or early pre-Mod 5 Mk 46s) a contact could probably get out of the torpedo's detection area if the right steps were taken once he heard the ping.
Don't ping him and you run the risk of the solution being off, and either way you're also dealing with the CEP / accuracy of your weapon actually putting your air-dropped torpedo right where you want it to go (again so much of an issue for a 250kt warhead) but the Sea-Lance probably would have had a lot of improvement in this department over the SUBROC.