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sandman455 -> RE: Allied CVs, early wwar (7/7/2012 6:37:34 AM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: jeffk3510
How come the Allies never had a long-legged land based torpedo bomber? No need with their carrier striking power?
Perhaps the reason there was little effort to hang the Mk13 on to LBA aircraft was there weren't many of them around and the ones that were available were just horrible. At least that was my opinion from personal experience reading about them while in the Navy. But for what its worth here is some supporting comments from the Navweaps website:
A total of 156 Mark 13 Mod 0 torpedoes were produced which was enough to provide two loads for each of the four 18-plane torpedo squadrons assigned to the pre-war carrier fleet plus a dozen spares. Mod 0 differed from later mods by having a rail-type tail in which the propellers were in front of the rudders. This was the only US torpedo to ever have this feature. The Newport Torpedo Station was unhappy with arrangement for reasons unknown and the Mod 1 entered service in 1940 with a conventional propeller arrangement, as can be seen in the photographs above. Unfortunately and unlike the Mod 0, the Mod 1 proved to be an unreliable weapon, with only one of ten torpedoes dropped by VT-6 during an exercise in July 1941 having a hot, straight and normal run. Of the others, four sank and could not be recovered while the other five experienced erratic runs.
These problems continued into the early war years, with a mid-1943 analysis of 105 torpedoes dropped at speeds in excess of 150 knots found that 36 percent ran cold (did not start), 20 percent sank, 20 percent had poor deflection performance, 18 percent gave unsatisfactory depth performance, 2 percent ran on the surface and only 31 percent gave a satisfactory run. The total exceeds 100 percent as many torpedoes had more than one defect. The early models were further handicapped by the need to drop them low and slow - typically 50 feet (15 m) and 110 knots - which made the torpedo planes carrying them vulnerable to attack.
I think by mid or late 1944 they finally got the Mk13 modded enough to make it semi reliable. It was still inferior (way too slow) compared to what everyone else was using, but it at least worked as advertised 75% of the time. But by that time there weren't many viable targets left for the weapon. I can't see trying to get new aircraft and crews up to speed on delivering it when there were so many under utilized TBF's in the Pacific.
As for skip bomb being some kind of replacement for torpedo bombing; absolutely not. Totally different targets and mission requirements. Heh, you don't want to get me going on skip bombing again. Just search the forums for that thread. And after reading and digesting all that skip bombing literature that was offered up. . .
I'm even more confident about everything I posted on the subject. [sm=character0095.gif]
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