Welcome aboard Pitts! Well, as I understand it, O'Kane set up the shot and then fired when the juicy parts 'passed the wire' e.g. the aiming mark on the periscope, so that would suggest Bow, MOT, Stern as the firing order. I don't remember him setting up for a different firing order. Have you got a page number for him doing that? It's been a while since I read either of those books.
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Originally Posted by Pitts2112
The other thing he mentioned is that Morton favored a 120 degree setup with the above procedure<SNIP>
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120 degrees of what though? 120 degree torpedo track angle? That would be fired from behind yes.
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Originally Posted by Pitts2112
And if I understand how this method uses the technology onboard, the TDC is still giving gyro angles to the torpedoes that factor in speed and angle on the bow of the target but, since the bearing is fixed, the PK is not updating the position of the ship. In effect, it's tricking the PK by saying that the target is at the shooting bearing before it's actually arrived there and just holding off on the shoot until it does arrive. True?
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Right, imagine everything is entered for the current target and it's all checked out with subsequent observations and the PK is running. What you do is move the periscope forward of the target and then tell the TDC operator to 'match' bearing. The TDC operator then moves the target bearing forward to match your aiming point. What this does is to advance the theorhetical TDC target along the ship's track, to a point where it would actuallt be if it had suddenly leapt forward along its own track. This makes the TDC adjust the range and the AoB of thetheorhetical target to what it should be for the target at that point. Now the TDC operator has to very carefully turn the target ship bearing input crank backwards so that the relative target bearing shown on the TDC does not move.
That's the key part really. What the TDC operated in this way what it is doing is continuously calculating the gyro angle for a torpedo to hit the spot at which the target's track and the aiming bearing intercept (if that spot was moving at the target's speed). This point moves continuously forward along the target's track, but less fast than the target moves along it. As you are calculating the intercept point between your periscope bearing and the track, when the part of the ship you want to hit arrives there as well, then you just fire a torpedo and it will hit that part of the ship. As the TDC is still running, it takes care of the range changes. The AoB will stay the same and as the speed is all entered in, the angle solver will provide the correct amount of advance to hit a moving target.