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RE: ship with unexplode torpedo
Posted by: kurt ()
Date: June 13, 2001 08:04PM

<HTML>There were many duds fired by the Americans and Germans while they worked out their respective (and very similar) exploder problems). But few, if any, actually left a torpedo sticking inside a ship, unexploded. I\'ve never heard of such an event. Duds would just bang on the hull of a ship, and then sink to the bottom of the ocean.

Even a civilian merchantman would have a steel hull many tenths of an inch thick just to withstand the stresses of ocean going. It would be hard for a torpedo, whose nose was not armoured, to penetrate through the steel plates of a merchant ship hull when travelling at only 30 or 40 knots - (80 km or less - no faster than a car on the highway).

War shots by torpedoes were designed to explode at the end of their runs or sink so that they could not be recovered (practice torpedoes were designed to surface at the end of their run for recovery and re-use - they were expensive!). An unexploded torpedo stuck in the belly of a merchantmen would prove to be an intelligence bonanza, yielding data on enemy technology, capability, and potential countermeasures. It would not be an historically obscure event.

For example, the US was greatly helped in its electric torpedo development by the capture of several German torpedoes.

By the way, Chong. I don\'t recall seeing you post before. If you are new, welcome to this phorum!</HTML>

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Subject Written By Posted
ship with unexplode torpedo chong 06/13/2001 08:10AM
RE: ship with unexplode torpedo Visje 06/13/2001 12:16PM
RE: ship with unexplode torpedo kurt 06/13/2001 08:04PM
Re: RE: ship with unexplode torpedo Natter 01/28/2016 08:06PM
RE: ship with unexplode torpedo chong 06/15/2001 10:39AM
RE: ship with unexplode torpedo Visje 06/17/2001 10:15AM
RE: ship with unexplode torpedo kurt 06/18/2001 01:35AM
Re: RE: ship with unexplode torpedo John Newman, Jr. 12/05/2015 06:23PM
Re: RE: ship with unexplode torpedo Rainer 12/11/2015 09:24PM


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