supercavitating torpedoes, page 2

reply to post by Wertdagf

Wont work,
the water will take heat away faster than it will be able to affect the pressure inside the envelope.
and sound waves will only work to destabilize the envelope.
but your on the right track, by manipulating the envelope's size and shape you can control the direction of the projetctile to some degree, but there is no way to have feed back to the projectile.
It is effectively isolated from the rest of the word by the envelope itself, there is no way to guide a super cavitating projectile with out a direct hard link to the guidence/tracking system( the wire in a regular topedo).

for those of you who may not know, modern topredoes have dual targeting/tracking system.
When the topedo is launched it plays out a very fine wire that connects it with the launching vessel. It is controled by the shipboard firecontrol till it gets to within a predetermined range to target, then it goes "free", it cuts the wire and goes to active on board tracking(pining with sonar) till impact.
In modern western torpedoes, if they dont hit the target within the target range parameters they can go to a search and destroy mode, they will slow way down and move in a pre programed pattern, occasionally pinging for a target.
Once a target is found they go back to full speed attack mode til impact or they run out of fuel.
This was the case in at least one lost us nuclear submarine.
Now as I look for this case, it is not to be found, really wierd.
I remeber reading about it in the 80's.
A US attack sub on patrol in the near the azores, reported a malfunctioning torpedo then failed to report back.
They reported they had a torpedo go hot in the tube, so it was summarily ejcted with all saftey intgerlocks engaged, it should have exited the sub and fallen harmlessly to the bottom.
It appears as though the torpedo was ejected without the saftey interlocks, and went hot as soon as it was launched and aquired its own launching vessel and sank it.
It was in looking for this vessel that Bob Ballard found the Titanic.
He was Commander in naval intel and the whole "search for the titanic" was just a cover, for a huge naval intel operation to locate this lost sub.
Much of the central/north atlantic was searched in the course of this multiyear operation. It only went public after the wreck was found and recovered by the glomar explorer.
A sunken older model soviet sub may also have been recovered, that may have been related to the loss of the scorpion.
During this search they found the titanic, the bismark and several other notable lost ships.
But in order to keep the real reason for the search secret, it toook several years to bring it all to the public view, sort of.
In 1989 I remeber watching a documentary about the the whole affair, and bob ballard freely talks about being a commander in a naval intel unit
that was tasked with finding this lost sub.
Sorry i digress

years ago while flying to my in-laws funerals(my mother/father inlaw died 36 hrs apart from natural causes, really really wierd), i busied myself by reading a paper on super cavitating projectiles, ie torpedoes/underwater missles and under water cannon projectiles.

At the time of the article there was no effective way of guiding super-cavitating topedoes. they would have to fired in a spread and hope that some wou;d hot a target.

[edit on 23-6-2009 by punkinworks]