Steve Thorpe – Deployment of weaponry

When I used to tour guide at Alliance, that’s one thing that I always used to emphasise about how weaponry is developed.

So, when I first joined submarines, it was the Mark 8 torpedo which sunk the Belgrano, so pretty much World War 2 technology. You would fire four weapons and hopefully two or one of them would hit, so like 25 to 50 % rate.

And then Tigerfish came along, and you would fire two weapons, Able and Baker, they used to call them, so they would go out either side of the bearing lines of wherever the target was, hopefully one of them would hit, so 50 % hit rate.

Now you’ve got Spearfish, that’s pretty much impossible to get away from, so you’ve got something like an 85% hit rate, so the way the percentages stroke success has incremented has been quite substantial with the weapons.