Torpedoes - How to use them correctly?

[Nax_o]

Could someone please say what you need to do to ensure torps launch 100% ? How to read the instruments correctly as the manual is useless.

At this time what works somewhat for me:

1) approach target, if it's a moving ship and you come from the side ait at the front tip of the ship or slightly ahead.

2) fly straight and not too close to the sea at first.

3) slightly tip the nose towards the sea

4) slow down speed so that the plane symbol AND speed is white.

5) fire torpedo.

With this however i still get WAY too many 'i lost the torp' messages.

for instance i just completed the zuikoku killing mission with dive bombers. it was not that bad - but with torpedo bombers that dont perform correctly the mission ended in a total slaughter.

[Ser Cartoon of House Head]

Basically make sure your plane on your hud is white. You just need the right altitude and speed and the wings to be horizontal.

[Nax_o]

How much white do i need? if there is even a little hint of red then it fails.

What speed should i have? altitude? Nowhere is it told what the optimal speed/height range should be.

Seeing the plane as 'white' does not seem to cut it because so many times i loose the torpedo when it should have been fine. Hate to repeat missions because of this.

[walter]

Ignore all the stuff they say about low and slow, just go slowish (not stalling) and make sure you are perfectly aligned with the HUD. Took me awhile to ignore their advice and do that, too. Could be better explained in the tutorial.

[Nax_o]

Well i have noticed that once you go TOO low and too slow putting up some speed and pulling up the nose a bit is the worst. Plane goes to red and then all you can or should do at that point is just forget about it and weer off.

Not that you get too many chances in missions like the carrier torpedoing mission. The flak fire is so thick that once you start switching from plane to plane everyone is badly placed and all are damaged. And i play this game on pilot difficulty.

[Old Roy]

During the tutorial, I constantly failed at torpedoes. Low/Slow/White... didn't seem to matter. So I played the entire US campaigns w/o torps. I just started the Japanese campaign and on the first mission (CAP where you find the sub) I was successful. Go figure. Maybe the Kates are more forgiving than the US planes? ;-)

For the Japanese torpedo bombers, it was between 35-40m alt. & around 178km/h. Aiming is a whole 'nuther ballgame, but easy enough.

[Nax_o]

Grinded a bit on torpedoes during training yesterday. Seems to me that you have to proceed towards the inteded firing line early on and keep the plane steady - then drop speed and a bit the nose. Once both speed and level is on white you must fire away immediately. Any attempts to fix this or keep it steady or change course even a bit will just make it worse or then the torp is lost.

Nevertheless this is currently too hard to do. i also did IJN first missions with big bombs instead of torps. Whacked the sub with bombs instead of torps.

By the time you start to really miss the torps in the missionsyou are already pretty good with the bombs. i can hit ground targets with either bomb planes or dive bombers pretty accurately at this stage.