Chapter 1390: 1307 Missed Target

The sailors aboard the Thunderbolt destroyer witnessed the entire process of their fleet’s flagship, the Sturgeon, being sunk.

They also received a warning message from the Sturgeon. Upon learning that the Tang Army possessed a torpedo capable of turning, their captain became very tense.

Compared to the Sturgeon’s captain, he himself doesn’t have much experience, nor are his sailors as elite as those on the Sturgeon.

A year ago, the world frantically expanded its navies, with various countries constructing aircraft carriers and building enough and large enough warships to mount newer weapons and equipment.

Torpedoes require people to learn how to operate, sonar needs to be learned to operate, radar needs to be learned to operate; the entire world’s navies lack enough soldiers to support their increasingly huge naval scale.

The Tang Country’s navy actually doesn’t have this problem; they have ample time to train mid-level naval officers and enough ships for these sailors and officers to accumulate experience.

The Great Tang Group indeed exports a large number of warships, but they never export sailors with the ships; the sailors on those warships are retained and used on more updated warships.

This led to a problem: the quality of the Tang Army’s sailors doesn’t change; it keeps steadily improving. Veteran sailors have advantages in experience; new sailors have their own understanding of technology; the combination of new and old sailors allows for mutual learning, ensuring combat effectiveness.

However, other countries integrate new technologies too quickly, new sailors can’t grasp all the new technologies, so their entire navies are filled with various inexperienced soldiers.

There’s no getting around it; lacking personnel is simply lacking personnel. The state of waiting for people to man ships has always existed in the navies of various countries, constantly troubling their commanders.

This situation also leads to damage control issues for allied fleets, complications when communication troops are interfered with, and more.

Everyone is unfamiliar with the equipment in their hands; it’s okay to use it barely, but once encountering problems, they have no experience to solve them, and they don’t know the principles, leaving absolutely no way to research countermeasures.

The Thunderbolt is exactly such a new destroyer; it was only built before the war, equipped with a radar shipborne radar developed by the Laines Empire. Its performance could only be described as average, and the overall standard of the warship was also quite ordinary.

It has depth charges and sonar; after all, the submarines previously exported by the Tang Empire included sonar technology, and various countries thus understood the crucial role sound plays in underwater detection. But to say everyone thoroughly understood this technology is really thinking too highly.

Everyone quickly copied a batch of sonar, installed them on destroyers, combined them with depth charges, only giving their country’s destroyers antisubmarine capability.

As in the past, countries worldwide have piled a massive amount of weaponry onto newly constructed destroyers, hoping these new destroyers play a significant role in this war.

The Thunderbolt is no exception; this destroyer has five single-barrel 130mm caliber main guns, equipped with radar and sonar, loaded with depth charge launchers, and features two quadruple torpedo launchers, making the armament quite powerful.

But most of the sailors on this destroyer are new recruits, with some of them having only served for a few months before being brought onto the battlefield.

The captain of this destroyer was previously a trainee on another destroyer; he had only been a first officer for a year or so, obviously lacking in experience.

He tensely awaited his destroyer to locate that lurking enemy submarine, but the sonar hasn’t detected any suspicious sounds from underwater.

No way, they are equipped with passive sonar, unable to actively emit sounds to rely on echoes to determine the enemy submarine’s location.

“Still haven’t found the enemy submarine?” The Thunderbolt’s captain anxiously looked at the officer in charge of the sonar, who shook his head, sweat on his forehead already starting to seep uncontrollably.

Before sinking, the Sturgeon had clearly warned them; if they missed the best attack opportunity, the opponent wouldn’t give them a second chance.

Once the enemy reloads new torpedoes, their Thunderbolt will also meet the same fate as the Sturgeon: sunk here.

“Impossible… As long as their propellers are still spinning, there should be some sound…” The captain of the Thunderbolt had never encountered such a situation before, becoming increasingly nervous.

In the two exercises he participated in, the sonar on his destroyer successfully located the “enemy” submarine, so he hadn’t thought about the scenario of charging in and failing to find the target.

The reality is that there’s a cacophony of propeller noise from numerous transport ships afar, while nearby there’s the sound of a sinking destroyer taking on water, coupled with the Tang Army submarine having almost slowed to a halt; the Laines Empire’s sonar simply can’t locate the target.

Both sides’ technology is fundamentally not on the same level, so amid an increase and decrease, the Thunderbolt destroyer indeed cannot locate almost merged into ocean background noise Tang Army submarine.

Moreover, whether it be the Sturgeon or Thunderbolt, they both miscalculated one thing… Yes, that’s right, they miscalculated the time the Great Tang Empire submarine would reload torpedoes!

At 60 meters underwater, the Tang Empire’s sailors had already closed the torpedo launch tube hatch, ready for the next attack.

In fact, the reloading speed of submarines isn’t constant, especially in modern submarines; the difference in torpedo loading speed is very noticeable.

In past submarines, only torpedoes in standby inside the launch tubes could be fired immediately; reloading subsequent torpedoes did indeed require significant time preparatory work.

Modern submarines have a more reasonable design and feature an automatic loading system for a second round of torpedo firing. Together with increasingly simple and reasonable torpedo calibration settings, the speed of the second salvo is very quick.

The semi-automatic loading equipment saves a lot of manpower and time, ensuring the submarine can swiftly fire a second salvo. However, the subsequent reload time may vary.

Submarines with larger interior space can still rely on loaders to reload torpedoes for the third salvo, so the speed of the third salvo remains quick.

But some submarines can’t do this; their crew needs to depend on hoisting equipment to manually transport spare torpedoes into the semi-automatic loading equipment for securing.

Even more unfortunate are some submarines whose spare torpedoes are stored beneath the torpedo compartment floor, needing to lift the floorboard and extract the torpedoes…