So in the long shot thread DR challenged me to prove, empirically, that Magnetic pistols work at 90 AoB (Not the discussion of this thread, take it somewhere else).
So I setup a Single mission with a type VIIb 1275m 90 AoB to port of a British Granville. August '39 to keep the Ship from reacting to my presence.
I was firing torpedos at the ship, 10 each of Magnetic and Impact, and each of fast, medium, or slow. That's 60 loads I was doing, all to settle this argument. First iteration was magnetic, set at 7m depth (6.1m Draft), and fast speed. Ship sank in 10 minutes 28 seconds. I was using sinking time as the determining factor in these trials. But the problem is, as you can see, I was getting erroneous messages. I didn't get a "impact" or "going down" messages, so I had to time from impact to action window. I was going to toss out that first trial (which at least proves magnetics work from high AoB's
, but again, different discussion), and run it again.
Second attempt, same setup. Fired torpedos, and I'm waiting for impact when all of a sudden I see a plume of smoke rising from the stack. Then foam behind it and my gyroangle starts changing. Hey! Wait! Stop! You're messing up my trials here!
This Neutral freighter, not reacting to the presence of my surfaced boat, detected and reacted to the wake of a torpedo. I'm assuming that this will vary depending on visibility conditions and crew skill. But it does finally answer the question of whether or not they react to torpedo wakes.
And I'm abandoning the project, as each load is still taking 3-5 minutes, and if these buggers are going to start messing up my experiments, I don't have all night to do this..... I feel like the controlling computer in Portal "Hey, what are you doing?"