The problem with a depth charge is that the thrower is close to it when it goes off-not very nice if you use a nuke one!i was recently reading a book about ww2 asw and it compared how much explosive was needed to sink/damage a submarine.Towards the end of the war the allies were using ahead throwing weapons rather than depth charges.I think the statistics showed it needed ten times less explosive to damage a submarine using this type of weapon.(I will dig the book out later and get you all the exact figures)

Another possibility is to use depth charges to clear mines-they can at least do that. There are a lot of them still around and if there is a war it would be a shame to let them go to waste.
Or they can be used as mines themselves just by giving them an anchoring device(free-floaters are considered dirty pool because they get into neutral traffic-though depth charges are made to sink anyway) and changing the fuse.

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I think ahead throwers were a variation of depth charges. Hedgehogs used contact fuses-they had enough stuff to smother the target and thought that would take the nuisance of estimating depth. Squids went back to depth fuses(I forget whether set off by pressure or simple time fuses).

Speaking of forward pitched depth charges...

Isn't that essentially what an RBU is, a depth charge on a rocket? I wish I knew more specifics about these weapons. Are they just like hedgehogs or what? Huuum... I may need to do some research...

JT, you are referring to "hedgehogs."

The hedgehog is more effective than a depth charge because a large number of them can be projected in a pattern ahead of the ship. Due to the wide area covered by the spread, it is possible to use a contact fuse for each individual weapon. Although each hedgehog round had a very small charge relative to a depth charge, it does not require very much explosive to cause catastrophic failure to a submarine hull at depth.

The depth charges required more HE because they were set off to be only somewhere near the submarine both in terms location and depth. Those cases in the old movies with several hundred pound depth charges going off within feet of submarines and them surviving the blast is strictly not possible... I'd imagine many submarines were sunk by depth charges perhaps several hundred feet away at the time of explosion.

I'm really not an expert, in fact, its been some time since I've looked into this deeply (all my naval energy goes to modern stuff these days). :p

@ SQ I'm redoing the RBU's for LWAMI4. It is a rocket propelled depth charge with a time/contact fuse.

http://www.bharat-rakshak.com/NAVY/RBU-6000.html

Cheers,
David

Huh... so I guess the idea is a lot like a hedgehog. You get a datum and the rockets land in a circular pattern corresponding to the speed of the submarine times the time late.