Wired torpedo

[The Bandit]

Originally Posted by stratege1401

If i am not wrong, the wired torpedo (usualy an optical fiber) is a torpedo who is supposely able to receive order like turn, dive, set internal sonar on or off.
Maybee without buying a one way ticket to any brig from Fort Leavenworth or Naval Air Station Jacksonville, could a real submarineer correct us ??

In game, i would be nice to have extra command like: disregard this sinking ship, your target is one mile aways, or please turn left, i say left, left ...

Because so far, the torpedo homing to a target (sinking, sinked) is homing and nothing else. Whatever order you are sending.

Another usefull command would be a self-destruction command. Sinking myself with a perfectly wired torpedo (no line broken) who refuse to execute my order to avoid killing me is not fun, and i am pretty sure irréallistic ...

Don't you think ?

I've never had a circular run out of a wire-guided torpedo with the wire still intact. You're correct that in many cases today they are using fiber-optics for this sort of thing, not exactly sure what they had back in the 80s.

To the best of my knowledge very little has been acknowledged on the specifics of torpedo guidance systems, however you are quite correct and a lot of these features were in some of the Sonalyst games.

Simplifying things quite a bit, I'm not sure if you could set a torpedo to ignore specific types of targets (although I wouldn't be surprised if you could) what you'd be looking at here is a "pre-enable / transit" condition which is to say the torpedo is not actively searching for or pursuing a target, its heading out to a programmed position where it will then activate its sensors and begin its search.

A "pre-enable" button would be great as it would solve a lot of the manual fighting you need to go through now in order to redirect a fish that's already been enabled and is tracking on a different target. A shutdown command would also work quite well for the cases where you fire off one too many.