Torpedo damage?

[RedTerex]

Successful Uboat Commander Erich Topp always stated " One torpedo one ship " and he never appeared to waver away from that.

[Kark]

Originally Posted by RemairTamec

For larger ships I take time to identify the exact model and aim a magnetic torpedo to pass just under its keel. The initial explosion is generally rather pathetic (even causing very little damage to its hull integrity) however it steadily takes more and more damage shotted 7kT ships.

Same here

Originally Posted by RemairTamec

Best bet for killing a ship that I've found with a single (or very few) torpedoes is to hit its bow at it is going flat out. My two capital ship kills so far have both involved this tactic, the ship ends up just planing into the sea nose first and goes down in minutes.

Same here as well, works fine for me.

Of course, when sinking a battleship with one perfect hit right at the bow which caused the munition of the two guns to explode i told myself:
"o...kay, that was lucky"

most ships will have the munitions bunkers between the first and second turrents on the bow and second to last turrent at the stern

I've just finished reading Memories of Johaness Spiess an U-boat commander of the I WW, and He was capable of sink 3 british battleship cruiser of 12.000 ton each in a few hours. 2 of this cruiser needed 2 torpedos but 1 was sink with just 1 torpedo. And this were battleship cruiser, I mean they were designed to resist a lot more punish that a freghter. They sink every one in less of 1 hour.

All the freighter Jonaness spiess sank needed just 1 torpedo, even though some ships required 1 or 2 shots from his canon in order to sink completely the ships.


So I think it is not realistic to need 3 torpedos to sink a tanker of 7000 t in SH5

[KleineUboot]

The damage from the torpedo mostly depends on where do you hit it. Small merchants will almost always sink after being hit with a single torpedo, most big merchants (like Cimmaron tankers and troop transports) will require at least 2 torpedoes to sink, sometimes even more (I remember a case with Cimmaron tanker near British cost, when it got 3 torpedo hits and continued to slowly sail away from my U-Boat, but I managed to finish it off later with a fourth torpedo).

[mobucks]

I sunk 2 16k ton troop transports with one torpedo each. One of them took at least two hours to sink.

[kevinsue]

Originally Posted by Sailor Steve

Of course it is, but you expressed the opinion that one torpedo should sink a ship. Often it is, but if you have a look through here http://uboat.net/allies/merchants/listing.php you'll see that many times they had to give them the coup-de-grace, and sometimes more than one. some ships sank in minutes and others took hours, or even days. There were ships that didn't sink at all, and were salvaged by the crew and managed to reach shore.

I could have just said that you shouldn't expect to sink a ship with one torpedo, but I prefer to give facts and examples.

Next time anyone has a spare moment during a patrol, pull out the SOAN and have a read about Silent Otto's duel with three British merchants, H.M.S Patroclus, S.S. Casanare and H.M.S Laurentic.

Kapitänleutnant Kretschmer was quite astounded how these ships managed to stay afloat after so many torpedoes were expended at them. He later realised that the Brits had been filling up any spare space on board with empty oil drums to act as anti-torpedo countermeasures.

You can find the story in the SOAN additional info under Troop Transports ~ Patroclus Armed Merchant Cruiser.