Especially in the early war, torpedoes in the game imitate the torpedoes fired in real life. See, the Navy figured that it was so expensive to shoot real warheads, that they just didn't do it! Instead they filled the warhead container on the front of the torpedo with water. The torpedoes worked perfectly.
Unfortunately nobody weighed a live torpedo and found that the warhead was heavier than water. Unfortunately, nobody thought it was necessary to weight the front of the torpedo to match a real warhead. Oops.
The result was when torpedoes were fired early in the war the size of the control surfaces and the amount of their deflection was not sufficient to force the torpedo to follow its set depth. And since the real warhead was heavier than the calibrated weight, the nose pointed downwards and the torpedoes swam too deep. Lots of targets were missed that way.
Unfortunately when you are sitting in a submarine you can't possibly see why your torpedoes are missing. You just don't hear a boom and you speculate why. The shore officers decided our sub jockeys couldn't shoot straight. Some of the sub jockeys like Commander Joe Enright of the Archerfish, the only submarine in the Navy ever renamed by her crew by the way, were convince themselves that they couldn't shoot. Many, like Enright, asked to be transferred off the boats so somebody with their head screwed on straight could command their sub.
Finally, Admiral Lockwood did some torpedo firing through a fishing net dangled down between two buoys. The torpedoes ripped holes in the net and by measurement they could tell whether the torpedoes were running at their set depth. They weren't. And we had been shooting torpedoes that wouldn't hit their targets for months....
Enright worked for Admiral Lockwood as senior desk jockey now. Enright found out about the SNAFU first hand. Enright was not a happy camper.
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