You know I really don't know them inside and out but there's a few things I do know. There's basically two types: circular and ladder. The circular are primarily anti-escort, aft tube, gotta escape! types. The ladder torps are generally anti-convoy, fore tube, get lucky types.
The little mouseover tooltips give better details but the best way to see what everything does is to use the solid green line on the attack map and fuss with the settings.
The circulars are pretty simple, they go out for a straight leg on the primary gyro angle just like a normal shot until they either right or left and run in circles until exhausted. I can't remember if the straight leg distance is settable or not.
The ladder type go out on the primary gyro for the initial leg and then do "switchbacks" of 180 degree turns (again left or right depending on setting) every time the secondary leg length is reached. I believe the early ladder types had 2 secondary leg length settings while later ones could be adjusted to anything but that's easily wrong.
I usually set the ladder type to turn in the direction the convoy is moving and set to a low speed so the torpedo covers a lot of ground. There's also no reason to shoot one blindly, go ahead and aim at a real target and maybe the ladder pattern won't even be necessary!
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