Torpedoes are causing enough trouble already Mikey, we don't need to bring mines in to the mix just yet!
I dont know what scale these are but would something like thede work? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSHr...re=related http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8h56...re=related http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xc43...re=related http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mkJ...re=related
If you could make them work in 1/96 then I think they would be fine. Launch them with compressed air, just a lot slower than the ball bearing kind of torpedo.
A 24" Japanese Long Lance torpedo would be 1/4" diameter in 1/96 scale. Those torpedoes look a bit big for that. I think some model submariners have made compressed air torpedoes as small as 1/4", but they don't have the energy to damage a ship's hull.
Well if the motor and battery in my old havoc heli would work 1/4 is doable but sadly both are in the trash after my 34 flight it fell in the toilet:}
The question with electric-powered torpedoes is how can you use one to punch a hole in a ship, without being a hazard to skippers on shore or retrieving sunken wrecks. And, of course, how to recover them afterwords. We *do* have a whole thread about torpedo development in the weapons section of the forum, after all.
I was reading moire on 1/96 Battle Station rules on their battlestations.org website and remembered that the Indiana class had a torp tube on the bow. Does that mean some on with a ship that has a torp tube on the bow can pull up next to an enemy ship and fire its torp without being called a ram? like say have a wisker or plate trigger on the front so went the bow touches the torp launches?
With the proviso that we have revamped the rules from the website's version... You can arm below-water tubes on ships that had them. Not sure on the tapping to fire the torps, because I could see that some arguments could arise over ram vs. torpedo damage.
If you're using Big Gun speeds and Big Gun thicknesses of armor, as I believe 1:96 Battlestations does, ramming is much less of a problem. It can still cause damage, but nowhere near as easily as in Fast Gun. The WWCC allows submarines to fire their torpedoes using a button on the bow, similar to JKN's idea. We passed a rule requiring that the button itself cannot cause damage. When it does, the button damage is very visibly different from the damage a submarine torpedo usually inflicts, since the button is usually offset from the barrels. The damage was easily reduced by adding a small pad over the firing button (a SMAV-3), to spread the impact over a larger surface area. This eliminated button-caused ram damage from all except the weakest-armored transports, and those are hard to tell anyway because of the water-shock damage. With that in mind, however, I wouldn't call a bow-mounted tube in a predreadnought a good use of space and weight. Opportunities to use it will be rare, and you'd get the same damage plus many more opportunities if you put a tube in each broadside.
If you had a Nelson-class BB, it has a submerged tube on each side of the bow. Possibly a very nasty suprise for that merchant skipper who likes to lean on you to get under your guns.( While all the time crying foul!) As well as the concentrated nine-barrel broadside when he gets pushed away by the torp blast, of course.
Here's another thought on torps: Specifically differentiating between above deck launchers and tubes Allow one "launcher" to fire per salvo. A quad launcher fires four torps, triple fires three, etc. (or a simulation there of under current rules: i.e section 5) Total number of salvos limited to the number of launchers. My Mogador would get a total of four salvos, two per side. An Oi would get ten salvos, five per side. Limit time between salvos per side to no less than one minute. This would prevent the "one shot kill", allow torpedo heavy ships to pack enough of a punch to be competitive, but still keep the play balanced where it does not become "who has the best torpedo platform" is the winner.
I like that idea, Dustin! It actually mimics real surface torpedo strategy. Ships rarely fired all torpedoes at once, although that did sometimes happen. Usually, DD's would fire a salvo and keep another salvo in reserve. I'd vote for this. Certainly makes torpedo ships more useful than the current rule proposal, and still much less deadly than the original rules. For example, under the current rules the old four-stacker DDs are all but useless, but with Dustin's proposal, they are worth a little bit again. Carl
