Comments by "Steve Valley" (@stevevalley7835) on "The Drydock - Episode 150" video.
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@IanLthestig As Walterbroadous said, torps of the time were not self-propelled, but riding on the end of a pole mounted on the bow of a sub, like the Hunley, or a steam powered launch. Another point is the confusion about terminology. When Admiral Farragut said "Damn the torpedoes" the torpedoes he was referring to are what are now called "mines". With the spar torpedo, the boat would ram the warhead against the side of the ship, and the tip of the warhead would embed in the wooden hull. The launch would then pull away to a safe distance and detonate the warhead by means of pulling a rope. As the spar torpedoes were usually delivered by surface vessels the defense system adopted was a boom made of logs, floating on the surface, so an attacking torpedo boat would be stopped before it was close enough for the spar to reach the hull. Eons ago, I read of a successful attack, in spite of the log boom, so I looked it up. An attack against the Confederate ironclad Albemarle was lead by Lt William Cushing on the night of October 28, 1864. The Albemarle was defended by a log boom, but the logs had been in the water a long time and were covered with moss and slime. The logs were slippery enough that Cushing's launch rode up and over them, and the attack was successful, with the warhead holing Albermarle at the waterline. The ironclad quickly sank. Cushing had detonated the warhead immediately on contact and the concussion threw him and all his crew in the water. Most of the crew were captured, but Cushing and one other crewman were able to evade capture and make their way back to Union lines. For this action, Cushing received the "Thanks of Congress". The Cushing family seems to have produced men with an exceptionally large pair. Cushing's brother, an army artillery officer, received the Medal of Honor posthumously for defending his position at the Battle of Gettysburg.
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@gregorywright4918 nothing in the Navweaps article indicates the Japanese used anything but the inertia pistol at that time, regardless whether the torp is surface, sub or air launched. Nets probably could have saved California, which was only hit by two. West Virginia and Oklahoma were hit with as many as nine, each. I read somewhere along the line that inspection of West Virginia indicated that a torp had gone right through the hole created by a previous torp. I have no idea how large a hole a torp warhead would tear in a net, but it's hard to believe that all nine, or even seven of nine, would be stopped, if they are all fired at the middle of a stationary 600 foot long ship. The two hits on California were pretty far apart, one just aft of B turret and one just forward of X turret. I don't see a diagram of the hits on West Virginia, but a diagram for Oklahoma shows a pretty tight group, with only #6 at a distance from the rest, with the other eight all hitting between 160ft and 280ft from the bow.
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@glennsimpson7659 sure enough. I had known how the San Giorgio ended up scuttled, but had not read the last line of the Wiki paragraph about Tobruk. As you say, some 39 British torpedoes were found stuck in her nets. So, we come back to the question of the pistol's tolerance of the rapid deceleration the torp would experience hitting a net. British torps used a magnetic pistol, which apparently proved unreliable. I can't fine anything definite, but the British pistol probably had an impact function as well. How the British pistol impact function worked, I can't find in a brief search. Was it, literally, a plunger on the nose of the torp, or a trembler switch? Navweaps calls the Japanese pistol an "inertia" type, which sounds to me like a trembler switch. A photo I found of a torpedo armed Beaufighter shows a very prominent plunger on the nose of the torp, but a cutaway drawing of a Japanese Type 95 shows the fuse pocket in the side of the torp, just like a German aerial bomb, which used a trembler. I would assume that, having developed a reliable pistol, the Japanese would use it on all models of torps, not just the Type 95. So, the question is, did the British torps not detonate in San Giorgio's net because the plunger did not happen to directly hit a cable of the net? Would a Japanese torp detonate under the same circumstances, because of it's trembler switch pistol?
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