but then nearly all US destroyers would have torpedoes that were harmless duds 8 out of 10 times. They'd sink too deep and fail, or the proximity-fuze would blow up too early and be harmless, or not blow up at all, so they turned that off and just used the impact-pistol fuze, which also failed nearly always.
Hell, early torpedoes could even mess up their steering and drift in 360 degree looping circles and sink friendly ships or your own ship that launched the torp.
Torps were calibrated for certain polarities. If you cross the equator, your atlantic torpedoes would harmlessly fail to detect any ships in the pacific ocean because they didn't have the charge which told the torps a ship was in the area.
The same with south pacific tuned torpedoes up north at japan or the atlantic.
Also, real life torpedoes were far, far slower and near worthless against ships moving at combat speeds unless you have an intense number of them.
A bliss-leavitt torp on the wickes, 36 knots in real life and 56 knots in-game. 56% sped up.
Even worse, ships in-game are 7x larger in size than the real life ships.
Imagine how easy it would be to dodge torpedoes that were as slow as ships and your ship is 1/7th as wide and 1/7th as long.
There would be enough time and space to squeeze even the world's largest battleship between torps fired at long range.
The real danger of torps was if the victim didn't know combat was happening and hadn't done any scouting. (Often-times via incompetence, like the U.S. failure Admiral John Mccain who was told to scout an area and agreed, then never ordered any scouting missions, which let japanese stealth-torpedo his fleet)
The victims would be drifting at 10-12 knots with half the crew (incl. the captain) asleep on the night shift, then suddenly a shootout happens and before the captain even gets back to the bridge and figures out who is fighting who and where and why, they'd already driven into a torp field with no evasion at all.
