Balance mainly. If submarine wants to spam torpedoes, they have to committ to it and accept they’ll be caught out for a bit while their tubes reload. If however a submarine brings a more balanced set of weapons in their tubes (such as a magnetic pistol in tube 1, a passive homing in tube 2, a wire guided active homing in tube 3, and a decoy in tube 4) it does decrease the potential damage they can do but it allows them to be more versatile in how they play. Also, you should have the ability to take a torpedo out and swap it for a different one, and the tubes should draw from a single store of torpedoes. This store would be modified similar to how many of a certain kind of shell you bring.
Y’know what, you’re correct here, I like your idea more than mine, torps with gyros should work like that.
See, I’d need to look it up but I think some of the early passive seeker torpedoes had two modes, a travel mode where it would just get to a point, and then an attack mode whereupon reaching the designated point, it would turn on its seeker, allowing it to manoeuvre to hunt vessels but in some torpedoes, this mode also slowed it down.
There should be no lock reticle for passive seeker torps period.
Agree, although I do think though that you should be able to set a distance traveled, upon which, the torpedo seeker would activate.
I think locking enemy ships through a radar like screen would be awkward but this discussion has inspired an idea for how wire guided torpedoes could work.
Wire guided torpedoes, when launched, would start off with their seeker off. The player can then control the torpedo by pressing a button. This puts the player in a third person view behind the torpedo but this does not activate the torpedo. From here, the player can only move the torpedo left or right, change the distance the torpedo needs to run before the seeker activates, what mode the seeker goes into upon activation (active or passive), what search pattern it goes into upon activation (either going forth in an “s” pattern or simply going round in circles), activate the seeker, cut the wire, and return to the submarine view.
Upon activating the seeker, the player gets full mouse control (or at least control over left, right, up, and down movement) over the torpedo. In the cases of some torpedoes, activating the seeker cuts either the range, speed, or both.
If the wire is cut, or it breaks for whatever reason (vigorous manoeuvres, the tube is being reloaded, the tube has been destroyed) then player loses all control of the torpedo, the camera is forced back into the submarine view, and the torpedo continues to run its course until it activates, it will then search for a target using the pre-selected search pattern until it finds a target and sinks it, or runs out of fuel.
