Well, obviously most of the exact parameters are classified.
But the devs need to make the game playable for everyone so they need to make some exceptions. For example, all boats in the game turn in a simplified manner - without any momentum. It's a good idea from a gameplay perspective, but if you want realism, you can safely change those values.
For MAD sensors I provided a source, which seems accurate enough - even document date is close to game time.
Or let's look at the most radical changes in my mod - torpedoes. If I remember correctly, devs stated that a lot of their info about torpedoes comes from this site:
http://www.navweaps.com/Weapons/index_weapons.php which is what I also used initially. But even using just this you can clearly find that for ex. Mk48 were said to be extremely noisy (which is also quite easy to deduce when looking at their propulsion types), yet in the game they are generally as noisy as any other homing torpedo (despite being faster). Then
Denis_469 showed up with a great deal of detailed information on Soviet and US weapons that seemed to shed some new light.
The thing is, while making this (and others similair) mod we don't need to worry about accessibility to every type of player. So yes, there is some personal preference, but it's at least backed by research. And also, isn't this the whole point of modding?