Slitherine

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ORIGINAL: rtrapasso

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ORIGINAL: Charbroiled

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ORIGINAL: MineSweeper

Even Tankers were tough to take down with one torpedo....read one account that a U-boat hit a dynamite cargo ship(5,000 tons of TNT) with one torpedo in the Gulf of Mexico....the ship sunk and was going down to the bottom and Kaboom, the U-boat was seriously damaged.....

I don't have the book (Operation Drumbeat) with me, but IIRC, there was a tanker hit by 2 torpedos off of the East Coast of the US. The crew started to abandon ship and the ship started sinking. The U-boat commander, thinking he had a kill, and afraid to still be in the area at sunup left the scene. Th crew reboarded the ship and managed to make it to port.

Tankers often (usually?) could withstand more than 1 torp, unless they were carrying something like avgas. This is especially true when travelling in ballast (i.e. without cargo).

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ORIGINAL: herwin

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ORIGINAL: niceguy2005

That is a really good question wild Wille. I can see how it might be highly variable depending on where the torp strikes.

Just out of curiousity how many torpedos did Indianapolis take?

Four.

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The T2 was the backbone of the wartime tanker fleet, and far more numerous than the other types. The T2 tanker design was first adapted from SS Mobilfuel and SS Mobilube, built for the Socony-Vacuum Company ( later to become Mobile Oil. ) these standard T2s were 501 feet 6 inches in total length, with a beam of 68 feet. Rated at 9,900 tons gross (GRT), with a deadweight of 15,850 tons, standard T2s displaced about 21,100 tons. Steam turbines driving a single propeller at 12,000 shaft horsepower delivered a top speed of 15 knots. The T2-A type tanker was an early design variation. Bigger but faster, they were 526 feet in total length, displaced about 22,445 tons, and were rated at 10,600 tons gross with a deadweight tonnage of 16,300 - yet they attained a top speed approaching 16½ knots. Only a few of each type were built.

By far the most common variety of the T2-type tanker was the T2-SE-A1, another commercial design already being built in 1940 by the Sun Shipbuilding Company for Standard Oil Company of New Jersey. These were 523 feet long, 68 feet beam, with 10,448 GRT and DWT of 16,613. Their turbo-electric propulsion system delivered 6,000 shaft horsepower, with maximum thrust of 7,240 horsepower, which produced a top-rated speed of about 15 knots with a cruising range of up to 12,600 miles. After Pearl Harbor, the United States Maritime Commission ordered this model built en masse, and 481 were built in extremely short production times.

The T2-SE-A1 had 9 sets of tanks. Tanks 2 through 9 had a main center tank carrying 391,500 gallons, and two side tanks ( one port, one starboard ) carrying about 165,000 gallons each. Tank number one consisted of only two side by side tanks, divided by a common bulkhead, as this tank set was only 13 feet 6 inches long. Tank sets 2 through 9 were 36 feet 6 inches long. Total cargo was about 5,930,000 gallons, about 141,200 barrels. There was also a small dry cargo space of about 15,200 cubic feet located forward of Tank Number 1 above the deep tank for a very small amount of dry cargo.

There were two pump rooms, one forward and one aft. The main pump room was aft, and contained six pumps. There were three large capacity pumps of 2,000 gallons per minute which were driven by electric motors located in an adjacent machinery space. There were also two 400 GPM pumps and one 700 GPM pump. In the forward pump room was one 700 GPM pump and 300 GPM pump which were reciprocating pumps used for fuel transfer and stripping.