Seeing that well thought out and gripping story, I see that I may have been in the wrong.
Firstly I see the max speed of that merchant was 19kts. Stupid me mistakenly thought 12kts. Hence my irritant at the ship racing away at a seemingly impossible speed of 13 kts.
But I have to point out (again). I am not talking about the ship NOT sinking. I am talking about it running off like it did. This is not the only occasion I have had this happen, with this class of ship. As I said it happens with every last one of them. But when a target presents itself after a simulated month of no action, ya gotta take what you get. Otherwise I just wouldn't deal with them.
The usual result of a torpedo attack was the destruction of the target. The odd ball results are ones such as the story depicted. Just like MANY B-17s and B-24s met a fiery fate, and only some came back missing entire vertical stabilizers, or half a wing, or flying all the way back to base after the crew bailed out. Those are the amazing stories of that time.
Gallant ships are gallant because they are rare. Their brethren went to the bottom with barely a whimper after the attack for the most part.
Have any of you read torpedo junction, Submarine, or Memoirs ten years and twenty days? There is account after account of ships being hit by one torpedo, and just vanishing. In "one of our submarines", when a torpedo hit, the ship remained afloat for maybe 10 to 15 minutes max, these are not fanciful novels, but novels written by actual submarine commanders.
I know you all don't seem to understand, but a torpedo packs a hell of a wallop. Were not talking a few pounds of TNT, we are talking a few hundred pounds of torpex. If the torpedo went off just below the ship, the back broke, period. If it went off too deep then the crew of the intended victim got a bumpy ride. and there would be one very frustrated sub commander watching his inteneded victim run off at high speed. If the torp hit the side at the waterline, well, it would definitely blow a hole in the side of the ship, which could be flood controlled if the hole did not spread between two bulkheads. But that hole would cause a whole hell of a lot of hydrodynamic drag, and cause the ship to limp along, not fly along at near full speed.
As I have stated before, the reason for so many torps getting sent at once was because torps were lousy, and either missed, run under, or failed all together. In the afforementioned books, one commander says that it took just one to incapacitate a sizable freighter, but the problem was, when that one would do its job.
I do not think I am out of line being upset with this happening everytime I encounter one of these ships, when I have read more accounts of ships just vanishing after one hit, than I have read of the gallant old freighter that didn't let its crew down. They are great and true stories, but they were not common, and no where near as common as they are in my current set up of sh4.
As a side note, it does not help that sh4 has a maximum range you can be from a ship before credit for its sinking becomes null and void.
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