"But, perhaps the game determines duds and malfunctions when we load the torps at base, so that changing files and replaying a save, might have no effect."
Probably. At first I was reloading the automatic save in base, that was the one where I got all the fish turning left 50 degrees off course. TDC problem unlikely, I was shooting at the KONGO that's loafing along at 1 knot in my "Gone Asiatic" mod - BB is steaming from left to right, so the usual TDC bug would have deviated the fish to the right rather than the left. Auto targeting is ON for all these tests. Now I'm deleting all saves and starting a new career after changing the data in the Torpedoes_US.sim file, but the suggestion about a single mission is probably the way to go - half a dozen YAMATO BBs at anchor maybe. My only concern there, does the game roll the dice the same way for careers as it does for single missions?
"Dice have no memory", unless they're loaded, of course!
deicide, welcome aboard, Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here.
I've been to Las Vegas a few times in my misspent youth (even got married there once godhelpus) so I'm familiar with the science - flip a coin and it has a 50% chance of heads or tails, get heads 20 times in a row the chances of the next flip are still 50-50 it will be heads or tails. The law of averages still states that out of 1000 flips approximately half will be heads and half will be tails. The law of random chance means that there's always a possibility that the first 20 flips will all be heads, but since I'm from Chicago I want to examine that coin carefully to see if someone is cheating. Problem with a game is we don't have any way to check if the dice are loaded or the coin is weighted on one side, so we're stuck with guesswork.
I suspect I'll have to fire 1000 mark 14s and see what happens, all I know is in the past having duds on in a stock game career means an unreasonable number of failures. Which again, is historically accurate, but doesn't make for a fun game.