Originally posted by Curval
I'm not so sure the torps would hit at 400IAS anyway...I've always been under the impression they had to be dropped below 200 feet and below 200 IAS.
Maybe that was just for the Midway scenario?
Oh, they'll hit... hit the water and desintegrate lol.
Here's what happened. The week before the ToD (as it was called at the time) some of my squadies and I practiced torpedo attacks over and over again in a H2H arena. We used the Baltic Map, and just kept upping, lining up, and launching torpedoes. We were OK at it, but certainly not very good.
So, the day of the event comes, and we fly up to 15k in a formation of TBMs, and SBDs, the SBDs were to dive in first and scatter the CAP, then the TBMs, which had set up north of the target were supposed to make a torp run after the SBDs had cleared out.
That's when things went horribly wrong. We had practiced from about 1,000 ft alt. In mission we were at 15k alt. We had no procedure for dumping that alt effectively, so by the time we were on the deck, even at zero throttle and doors open, we were still doing 400 mph... The next thing we knew we were in AAA City. We dropped torps figuring that either way we were dead, who knows, maybe it'll work lol.
-Sik