Torpedoes - experts needed

[TopTorp '92]

Originally Posted by Dr.Sid

Lol .. it was clear .. until now. You said:

1) The only caveat is that significant pitch/roll deviations will result in an internal shutdown.

2) It banks freely.

As I understand it these two are contradicting. Or maybe you don't mean bank & roll to be the same as I do ?

Shutdown is tricky, so I didn't really address all of the caveats. Also, I'm operating on decade old memory. So, just bear with me.

There are two systems protecting own-ship from a faulty torpedo that may turn and come after the home team.

From the moment the weapon is fired (TOF-Time of Fire) to the enabling point, that is the weapon slows to search speed, ACR (for anti circular run) protects ownship. This is the "internal shutdown" I referenced above. After the enabling point, ACR becomes disabled. ACR shutdown limits are technical and I no longer remember them. Pitch/roll is +- 5 degrees, I think. Gyro deviations are +- 168 til the first gyro null and then +- 5 degrees til enable.

After the enabling point, there is an additional safety feature for Mk 48 called ASH (anti self homing.) It is a discrete setting in the torpedo meaning it is either set in or out. It's too complicated to explain how it works because it uses counting system that counts twice as fast if the weapon changes course by a predetermined amount.

ADCAP is a digital weapon and no longer needs to know how to count the old MK-48 way. It uses FENCE after the enabling point and this feature not only protects ownship from a torpedo coming after ownship it also has lateral limits that prevents the weapon from homing on targets outside the lateral limits. Basically the weapon swims around in a digital box defined by the weapons operator. Any target outside the box is off limits. The idea is to protect hospital ships or if using the weapon in littoral waters, then the latteral FENCE settings may protect nearby civilian shipping.

The weapons operator may override both ASH and FENCE after TOF if the guidance wire remains in-tact. Unfortunately, if the wire breaks during an override command, then the safety feature remains permanently overriden til the weapon either runs out of gas or blows up.

To answer your original question, the weapon rolls freely after the enabling point has been reached. However, during the enabling run, there are safety limits that will shutdown the weapon if exceeded. It depends which phase you're talking about.

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