I am a fan of the saying that those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it. After all, humans have been building things for a number of centuries and we should learn from the engineers of the past. While you can learn a lot studying successes, sometimes — maybe even most of the time — we learn more from studying failure. The US Navy’s Mark 14 torpedo certainly has a lot to teach us.
The start of the story was the WWI-era Mark 10 torpedo which was fine for its day, but with faster destroyers and some additional data about how to best sink enemy ships it seemed necessary to build a new torpedo that would be faster, carry more explosive charge, and use a new method of detonation. Work started in 1931 with a $143,000 budget which may sound laughable today, but that was a lot of coin in the 1930s. Adjusted for inflation, that’s about $2.5 million.
Changes Needed
Data from the earlier war indicated that you got the most effect by detonating explosives underneath a ship. This was especially true since warships were adding torpedo blisters to absorb strikes along the hull. With a contact fuse, you would tend to explode on the hull somewhere along the perimeter of the ship’s envelope and a ship — especially one with blisters — was more likely to survive the strike.
Contact triggers were out and instead the torpedo would read the change in the magnetic field caused by the enemy ship’s hull and detonate under the ship, splitting the target in half. Unfortunately, the Earth’s magnetic field varies based on location and this made the new detonators unreliable. Some est ..
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