Do Russian torpedoes even do any damage?

[Dogbert]

I managed to hit a Japanese armoured cruiser with 3 torps all on the same side and within a fairly short time of each other... didn't move its damage level from yellow (which is where it was before the first one hit...)... I observed the splashes, shouldn't they at least do something?

[Rhetor]

In one Battle a damaged Japanese protected cruiser was finished off by a torpedo fired from the passing-by "Pobyeda" :-D

Anyway, the torpedoes were not yet the devastating weapon of the world wars. They were small, slow, unreliable and had little effect. In the game they are beefed up - in 1904 - 1905 torpedo hits were pretty rare, even in perfect conditions - as illustrated by the Port Arthur attack, where the Japanese scored only three hits.

[Dogbert]

Yeah... but here I did in fact score 3 hits, and they seemed to explode... and they were all on the same side (and different areas of the ship in fact)... 3 hits like that should do SOME damage to a cruiser? A good while later she is still steaming along at 19 knots.

[Daedalus]

Yea they do, I have finished off a few ships with the Torps.
You will find a few duds but so far they do fine. I have found that your ships need to be close or the other ship will avoid the torpedo,so you have to close in to get a hit most of the time. And as Porkchop says you can break up a line of ships when your ships or ship shoots a torpedo at them.

[Bullethead]

Yeah... but here I did in fact score 3 hits, and they seemed to explode... and they were all on the same side (and different areas of the ship in fact)... 3 hits like that should do SOME damage to a cruiser? A good while later she is still steaming along at 19 knots.

The effects of torp hits seems to be highly variable, which I think it cool ;). Sometimes you'll see the wakes run under the ship and out the other side. Sometimes you'll see the wake stop but no hit splash. Sometimes you'll see hit splashes but not much damage. Sometimes 1 hit is totally devastating. In general, however, Russian torps are much weaker than IJN torps, thanks to being rather smaller.

Here's an interesting tidbit I've noticed. Torp hits leave black smudges on the ship just like shell hits do. You only get to see them when the ship capsizes, of course. But the thing I've noticed is that the smudges from torps can vary a lot in size, or even be nonexistent, just like some shell hits fail to leave smudges.

I assume (although I could well be wrong) that the bigger the smudge, the more damage done by the hit. It's interesting to note the different sizes of torp smudges and compare them to the hits you remember seeing. The biggest torp smudge I've seen was huge, like the size of a 12" battleship turret, and it was all the way down on the keel, right where you'd expect a torp to do the most damage. However, most smudges (at least from Russian torps) seem to be about the size of a 6" shell smudge, and are somewhere on the side below the waterline. And like I said above, some hits fail to leave a mark at all.

[Dogbert]

You're most likely right. It was just quite frustrating to finally get a good run and have a bunch of torps hit anything and even explode, and then... nothing.

[SunScream]

Don't expect much from attacks by the older torpedo boats, on both sides.
They had the 14" Whitehead torpedo, which had a miniscule range and equally puny warhead.
The long 14"/356mm had an explosive charge of 78lb/35kg (guncotton?) compared with the long 18"/450mm torps' 198lb/90kg warhead.

Neither are particularly impressive.
Treat the 14" hits as equivalent to an 8" shell hitting below the waterline - it causes some flooding and may cause machinery damage if it hits in the right place.
Treat the 18" as a 12" shell. Bound to cause some trouble to the target and can be catastrophic in the right spot.

The really nasty beasts were the 18" model 1904, which was introduced just before the war, the first examples being bought up by both the Japanese and the Russians, although the Japanese would get theirs first...

The 1904 has an explosive charge of 2198lb/1000kg*, and a range which was some four times greater than the 14".
You can treat these as a torpedo hit, if you know what I mean :D

* Thats the figure in JFS 1905-06.

[Dogbert]

Which one were the Russian destroyers carrying?

[SunScream]

All the Russian destroyers carried 18" torpedoes.

[String]

The 1904 has an explosive charge of 2198lb/1000kg*, and a range which was some four times greater than the 14".
You can treat these as a torpedo hit, if you know what I mean :D

* Thats the figure in JFS 1905-06.

Most likely a typo. Navweaps.org gives the figure as 100kg. The whole torpedo weighed 610kg

[SunScream]

Thats more realistic. I thought "thats far more than a 21" normally carried".
A 100kg warhead is still not much of a stinger though. Better than a 12" shell below the waterline, but not by much.

[Dogbert]

Still, 3 of those should do some damage to a cruiser, no?

[Bullethead]

All the Russian destroyers carried 18" torpedoes.

I don't believe that's correct, sir. Conway says the Puilki-class, Boevoi, the Bezstrashni-class, and our favorite Lt. Burakov all had 15". Only the Boiki-class had 18". And that agrees with the "381mm" torps I see reported from the Russians.

[SunScream]

There appears to be some disparity between Conway and Janes.

Janes 1905-6 annoyingly fails to mention the size of the tubes in most cases, however the Russian destroyers have names and tube size (18") for all except new builds, which includes Boyevoi and, somewhat strangely, Lt. Burakov.

The Bezstrashni is mentioned in JFS 1905-6, listed amongs the 13 "Schichau" type destoyers of 1899 on. It states "2-18 inch tubes (one each side of after funnel)"

The Puilki isn't mentioned in either JFS 1905-5 or 1919, but there is a Prulki in the "Early Yarrow type" which has "2-18 inch tubes (aft)" in JFS 1905-6.
Significantly in JFS 1919 Prulki is listed as having one 15" tube and 18 mines. This could have been a refit with a deliberate reduction in tube size to accomodate the mines.

Boyevoi does get a mention in JFS 1919 and the tubes are mentioned as being 18". I doubt that the Boyevoi would have a tube size increase at any point in it's career due to the extra weight involved.

As for our speedy LB, all bets are off - I can't find any solid data for it. The German Taku is mentioned in JFS 1905-6 but it just mentions it has two tubes.

I will admit Janes isn't always the most accurate of books. Arguing about the facts is part of what makes history fun!

:)

[Bullethead]

I will admit Janes isn't always the most accurate of books. Arguing about the facts is part of what makes history fun! :)

You have to rememeber that all Jane's books, then and now, are based on the information that was available at the time the particular edition was written. Therefore, in every one of Jane's books, some of the data is incorrect or even speculation. Jane's has informants all over the world, but doesn't have its own intelligence service per se. Military secrets often remain so through many editions, such as the speed of the IJN Nagato. As time passes and Jane's gets better info, they put it in subsequent editions if the ships in question still exist, but they don't go back and update previous editions.

Also, it appears that Fred Jane himself had a political agenda of his own, and he used his books somewhat as a propoganda tool during the naval arms races when he was alive. When he had conflicting info about some non-Brit ship, he seems to have gone with the more powerful choice to help convince his home audience to build a bigger navy. But that aspect of Jane's doubtful info only affected editions of long ago.

So when you look at the 1905/6 Jane's, what you're seeing is frozen moment in time. It's showing a combination of what Jane's knew, thought, believed, and wanted readers to believe, at that point in time. Being as this was one of the 1st Jane's books, his informant network was much smaller than it later became, so the quality of the info presented in that edition was rather lower than in subsequent editions.

OTOH, books like Conway's FS 1860-1905, written long afterwards, had access to much better sources of information in many instances. When there's a conflict between them, I generally go with Conway. However, Conway's has its own problems. Each nation's info is written by a different person, and each of these people has different standards as to what he believes is true. Therefore, Conway's often has internal inconsistencies, such as in the reported speeds of the IJN DDs and TBs, written by A.J. Watts, and that of their twins and clones in the Royal Navy, written by David Lyon.

[SunScream]

I don't have any copies of Conways except ones on sailing ships, The Line Of Battle, so that is a little unhelpful in this case :)

As for JFS, I agree that they are "of the period" so can't be entirely accurate. In JFS 1905-6 there is clearly some attempt to diminish the qualities of Dreadnought, for example.

It's amazing what little details fall through the gaps in books. Dreadnought is one of the most studied vessels of all time and yet, as John Roberts notes, we have no information on the internal structure of the funnels. The details are not in the ship's covers.
Although the structure of the funnels is a small, almost irrelevant detail, there are gaps and inconsistencies in a lot of more critical data and then we are down to conjecture and the danger of agendas again.
Currently we have historians re-evaluating the capbilities of German warships (possibly overcorrecting), and people like James Cameron stating that the Bismarck was pretty much unscathed below the waterline by the rain of British shells and torpedoes.

As for my database, I suppose I will have to cough up the cash for some more Conways, or raid the library at Watchfield again.

[Bullethead]

Currently we have historians re-evaluating the capbilities of German warships (possibly overcorrecting), and people like James Cameron stating that the Bismarck was pretty much unscathed below the waterline by the rain of British shells and torpedoes.

There does seem to be at least some truth in that. The picture of Bismarck I'm getting these days is that she was relatively easy (for a modern BB) to put out of action, thanks to her armor deck being too low to protect a lot of systems important for control of the ship, but bloody hard to sink. That much seems pretty clear to me. But whether it really required German scuttling charges on top of everything else to finally put her down, or whether she'd have sunk anyway just from Brit damage is something we'll never know for sure.

I believe, however, that she was on her way down from combat damage, although it might have taken her up to another day or 2 to finally go under. Water had many ways inside before Tovey left and there were major fires burning out of all possibility of control. Steel structural members lose all their strength rather quickly when exposed directly to flames, so the hull structure was deforming and collapsing under its own weight even as Tovey watched. Over time, that would have opened up many ways for water to spread throughout the ship.

As for my database, I suppose I will have to cough up the cash for some more Conways, or raid the library at Watchfield again.

Definitely. No naval grog can afford to be without at least the 1860-1905, 1906-1921, and 1922-1946 volumes :).

[WallysWorld]

No naval grog can afford to be without at least the 1860-1905, 1906-1921, and 1922-1946 volumes :).

Thanks a lot!

You cost me $60 CAD because I just ordered the 1860-1905 Conway book from Chapters. :smoke:

[Bullethead]

You cost me $60 CAD because I just ordered the 1860-1905 Conway book from Chapters. :smoke:

Hehehe, I'm gonna have to buy me another copy soon. My present copy is falling apart after many years of hard service. It's amazing how badly you can ruin books by repeatedly snatching them over your shoulder from off the shelf, tossing them in your lap, rapidly flipping to the dog-eared page with the reference you need, then tossing them on the floor while you type a reply in some message board, and finally tripping over them when you get up, not to mention spilling beer, dripping glass condensation, and sprinkling Tostito crumbs on them all the while :(