Briefing Room

What Is The Best Distance To Fire Hedgehogs?

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What Is The Best Distance To Fire Hedgehogs?

#15
Hedgehogs where a far better AS weapon than DC.

The projectiles described an arc optimized to catch a submarine of the time, and dived quickly so the sub commander had less time to react.

Since it was nearly impossible to score a direct hit with DC, the damages caused by hedgehogs, even if the explosive charge of a 'hedgehog grenade' was much smaller, where more lethal. The charge -60 lb of high explosive, if I remember- was enough to sink a sub, or at least to force it to surface. Only luck could save a sub caugh in a hedgehog arc. 😳

What Is The Best Distance To Fire Hedgehogs?

#18
Radio waves can travel under water. The USN uses ELF (extremly low frequency) radio waves to call thier subs to the antenna depth to communicate with them. And about the magnetic detonation, WWII magnetic detonation systems were extremely unreliable, especially in the beggining of the war. The USN's torps only detonated about 10% of the time, even if they passed right under the target.

What Is The Best Distance To Fire Hedgehogs?

#19
The problem with magnetic exploders is that the shape of a ship's magnetic field varies depending on the ship's latitude. The other problem with the American torpedoes was the fact that the firing pin was too soft and prone to being bent out of shape.

ELF is primarily used to let the sub know that there is a message waiting for them. Once a sub recieves an ELF signal, they will go shallow to recieve the actual message. Low frequencies are very slow and require a great deal of energy.

From what I've read about hedgehogs, the idea was that when one goes off, they all go off. In fact hedgehogs were involved in a very tragic blue on blue incident in WWII. The USS Seawolf was sunk by another US destroyer using hedghogs.

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