Gyroangle vs bearing

[Nedlam]

So you lined a textbook shot (almost) and your watching the gyroangle and the bearing to your target. What's more important?

[TheSwampFox]

I've had much better luck with ~0 gyroangles than 10 degrees and beyond. I've had detonations at fairly shallow AOB, but if the gyro is too far off it tends to mess up the whole shot. Just my observations.

[humesdog]

Not forgetting to open the torpedo door ;) In real life kaleuns wanted a small gyro angle because torpedoes would sometimes fail to fully turn on larger ones. But I think most important is making sure the target is running across your track, and the torpedoes path is close to a right angle. So neither.

[JBClark]

Not forgetting to open the torpedo door ;) In real life kaleuns wanted a small gyro angle because torpedoes would sometimes fail to fully turn on larger ones. But I think most important is making sure the target is running across your track, and the torpedoes path is close to a right angle. So neither.
I agree that remembering to open the doors is paramount. :damn:

Here's how I look at it:

Early in the war when the magnetic pistols were unreliable, impact shots offered the best chance of a good hit. For an impact shot to detonate, the eel needs to strike close to perpendicular-both on the horizontal and vertical axes. Therefore maneuvering for a shot that will strike at close to 90 degrees AOB was the overriding strategy.

Later as the magnetics became reliable, AOB was not as important to ensure detonation. However, low AOB provides a narrower window to hit in the first place. So now range (or more accurately) time to target matters even more. The longer the run, the more accurate your solution needs to be, and the fish needs to run truer to that solution. A small gyro angle gives the best chance for a true run.

So my general strategy is if faced with a relatively close target, I'll work with what I've got. I like ~90 degree impact shots where I can get them and if close enough, it doesn't matter as much if you miss by a few feet fore or aft. If I'm close but faced with high AOB, I'll turn to get as low a gyro angle as possible because I have a smaller target to hit and less time to resolve the angle.

If the target is far away, I generally only shoot when I can satisfy both AOB and gyro and then only if I am still undected and the target is not maneuvering.

This brings me to my favorite tactic in a knife-fight. When in a turning fight with a warship high AOB is all you are likely to see. And the other problem of course that you are often inside the eel's minimum radius. I solve this with high gyro angles that give the fish some more time to run and if done properly strikes right on the beam. With practice, this works more often than you might think. Rarely have I had a torpedo fail to resolve its gyro angle if given enough run.

There are times when I find myself smack dab in the middle of a convoy, with precious little room to maneuver and even less time. This is even more the case if there is heavy fog and you never even see ships until they are approching the minimum arming distances. And by the time they are far enough away for your fish to arm, you can't see them well enough to calculate a solution. What I have begun doing in these cases is to try to run a parallel course, a few hundred meters off either beam, and hook a torpedo right into his side. I have been able to do this with 90 degree gyro angles more often than not. Much more often than not.

So the answer to the question is that all shots are different. Each problem will have a number of solutions; experience and desperation generally dictate which one I choose. Patience is your most valuable asset but sometimes it will get you killed.

High gyro angles have saved my life, good AOB gets good tonnage. :know:

Good Hunting,

JBC