Take EVERYTHING in that article with a giant tub of salt. The specifics of torpedo combat are some of the most closely guarded military secrets.

Take the following: "These high-torque, permanent magnet electric motor torpedoes ramp up to speed in under a second. They go from sitting in a torpedo tube to 50 knots in a near-instant because they don’t have the mechanical lag and inertia thermal torpedoes must overcome during startup. "

So much of that is totally wrong. The torpedo has nothing to do with how it gets out of the tube. Its propulsor (not a propeller) wont work from the back of a torpedo tube. Starting it up in the tube, INSIDE the sub, sounds horribly dangerous. The torp is ejected by force from the sub and then starts its engine. Electric or thermal, it's doing 50+ whether it wants to or not. Once out of the tube, further acceleration potential is limited by depth/pressure. All torps have more than enough torque to start cavitating their propulsor in shallow water. To continue to automotive analogy, it doesn't matter whether your car is electric or turbine powered, acceleration is limited by how much power your tires can handle before spinning.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PjoholiW1ho

And this is why you don't want that engine running prior to the torp leaving the tube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KoElLaLcfOc

Somewhat related, my uncle was a “Phantom driver” (F4 Phantom II) in Vietnam. Flew a bunch of missions of varying types.

So Top Gun comes out, and my mom points out he had graduated Fighter Weapons School - my uncle is a real Top Gun!

So I asked him for tales of dogfights, war stories. He had exactly one: “they’d send us out to fight some MiGs, and as soon as we got in range and turned our radar on to start shooting, they’d turn and run.”

So not like the movies?

“Nope.”

You mean like how torpedoes actually detonate when they hit a target in a movie ? ;-)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_14_torpedo

Or how in the movies they don't run in circles and sink the submarine that launched them ?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_18_torpedo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Tang_(SS-306)

How is there an article entitled "modern submarine torpedo attacks" apparently written in 2020 that doesn't contain the word "supercavitating"?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VA-111_Shkval

A misconception I had was that submarines fight each other under water.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_submarine_U-864

"It is the only documented instance in the history of naval warfare where one submarine intentionally sank another while both were submerged."

Outstanding article, very informative, but the tense and tone is slightly amusing to me:

> Actual underwater combat occurs silently with very little reaction time to fend off an impending attack.

Does it occur? Do we have any examples of "actual underwater combat" occurring? I don't believe we have any real life examples of nations withs submarine capabilities in combat. War games probably don't count...

Has any ship been torpedoed by a submarine since the Admiral Belgrano in 1982?

Side question -- do submarines really have the ability to ping, like in Hunt for Red October, do they ever use it, and does it actually use the frequency range of human hearing like that? Do torpedoes? Or are they ultrasonic (given that depth gauges I know are ultrasonic). I assume that subs once did use such pings historically given how common that sound effect is associated with them. Maybe not any more I guess?

> With command wire capabilities, the weapon can change its attack geometry or even shut down if directed by the fire control operator. Detected targets can be changed, depth and range limitations can be set, and countermeasures, such as decoys and jammers, can be ignored using the submarine’s sonar data instead of the torpedo's lower-fidelity onboard sonar data. If the data link is lost, the weapon will follow its last given command and execute pre-programmed countermeasure defeating profiles, if necessary.

This somehow reminded me of the final scene from John Carpenter's Dark Star (spoilers, obviously) where a smart bomb wants to blow up (yes, you read that right), and the crew has to talk it into not doing so by using philosophy to give it an existential crisis:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h73PsFKtIck

“A torpedo cannot be ‘command-detonated’ as seen in the movie Hunt for Red October.”

Why is this so? The wire controls seem sufficient.

The most in recent serious submarine attack, the sinking of the Blegrano they decided to skip the fancy homing missiles due to unreliability and fired three non-guided torpedoes so it was a bit like the WW2 movies.

I rip on surface fleets as being floating reef fodder that would be sunk almost immediately against any modern power, either because of the sophistication of submarines, the rise of cheap drones winning the economic exchange, or death-from-above missles and ICBMs that are basically undefendable.

But against subs I'm surprised there aren't plans for a drone-net that surrounds a fleet or high value ship that can detect incoming underwater threats via some mesh networking.

When you store unguided torpedo inside capsule in the bottom of the ocean, or allow it to float in some predetermined depth, you have Torpedo mine, like CAPTOR.

You don't need expensive submarines, if you want to protect narrow points or specific areas. You just drop torpedo mines underwater.

Never occurred to me that torpedoes can be battery powered. Any idea what kind of cells they have?

I got confused by the dual units here:

> 65cm torpedoes have enough fuel to travel in excess of 100 kilometers at 50 knots for just over an hour.

Turns out 1 knot/hr is nearly 2km/h so that checks out. Weird nautical units.

> The batteries are connected in series allowing each weapon to have 2, 3, or 4 batteries. More batteries give the weapon more range. Fewer batteries make the weapon much lighter and more agile, but at the cost of range.

This sounds wrong. Shouldn't they be connected in parallel?

I think it would be more interesting to have a list of things that are like in the movies, as I assume it would be a lot shorter than the list of things unlike, and rarity is in many things considered more important than the common.

Does anybody even attack submarines nowadays? Isn't the sole purpose of a torpedo - to make the opponent believe they better avoid attacking you?

The article misses out on other forms of submarine attacks, like anti ship missiles (harpoon) and ballistic missiles.

Wonder how much of this will translate to space combat.

Favorite article comment:

"I love these deep dives on a topic."