The Burkes on the other hand are AA machines. Or will leveling effect nerf them too?
The way the leveling effect works, more or less, is that stuff from 1945 is competitive with present day stuff. So how badly the leveling effect works on something depends on how competitive it is with present day stuff.
The Burkes have been the best AAW destroyers in the world from the day USS Arleigh Burke was commissioned.
Basically, the Burkes are going to be slightly worse than the Atlanta-class CLAAs. (If there were any Ticonderoga-class CGs available, they'd be the equivalent of an Atlanta, as they remain
slightly better at AAW and ASuW than a Burke. Ironically, they might actually be
better than a Flight-I Burke at ASW, what with having the helicopter and hangar...) You might put the Burkes at the level of the Forrest Sherman-class DDs that started coming out right around the end of the war--essentially, they were Fletchers that replaced the five single 5"/38 mounts with three twin 5"/38s, giving them one more gun and more centerline space for other weapons like torpedo mounts and/or Bofors quads.
That's for surface ship and air-launched torps. SSNs and SSBNs still carry heavyweight 21" torpedoes, namely the massively powerful MK48.
I don't think any WW2 sub is gonna be launching those anytime soon.
Ironically...
IRL, the Taiwanese Navy has two WW2 veteran submarines sold to them in the 60s as training boats by the USN, one Balao-class and one Tench-class. While the terms of the transfer saw their torpedo tubes welded shut prior to the sale so that they could only be used for training purposes (in particular, as ASW training targets), they have since had said tubes restored to operation (sometime in the 1970s). What's more, the Taiwanese Navy
does have a stockpile of Mark 48 ADCAPs that they officially bought for their more recent boats... but the ADCAP will fit into the tubes on those old girls just fine, and modifying the tubes to operate the ADCAP's control-setting gear is a minor thing. It's quite likely that, in any war scenario, those two WW2 boats would be loaded up with ADCAPs that they are under orders to use in Bearing-Only Launch mode (where it basically is a straight-runner until it detects a target on its own, then starts autonomous homing).
Granted, an ADCAP would be comparable to either a late-war Mark 14 or a Japanese Type 95 (smaller version of the "Long Lance" for submarine use), courtesy of the levelling effect, but it's still a case of a WW2 sub being able to launch a Mark 48. (Amusing sidenote: A few years back, the old Mark 4 Torpedo Data Computer on one of the boats broke down, so the Taiwanese Navy contacted the USN for technical support, as per the transfer agreement. The USN's reply was, "...bwuh? Uh, I don't think we've had anyone who knows how to work on one of those since... 1970? At the latest?", and the Taiwanese instead had to contract with the only place that
did have experience working on the old Mark 4 TDC, the crew from the
Pampanito that had just restored her TDC to operational status.)
R - The Abyssal 262-Cs probably have the power to lift a Fritz-X, but nowhere to put it. So discussion of Fritz-Xs isn't entirely dumb. Just an instance of not thinking things all the way through.