Live torpedoes against manned friendly targets is an exceedingly bad idea, yes. It's the kind of thing Court Martials are meant to handle.
However: Easy way to check running depth of torpedoes:
Step 1: Make an underwater target, with circles around 'perfect hit at perfect depth', and depth lines. Make it out of something that will get marked by the torpedoes underneath.
Step 2: Take a standard torpedo, change out the explosives for the same weight in steel so weight and balance remains the same. Leave the detonator so 'detonation at target' can be tested. Detonator blown up = torpedo worked.
Step 3: Get a few observers, preferably from a few torpedo boats, and make a contest of it. A dozen dropped torpedoes by plane, a dozen torpedoes fired from torpedo boat at equivalent range at speed. Maybe get an uboat captain in on it if you can.
Step 4: Make doubly certain all results are checked and noted down exactly.
Step 5: Watch fireworks.
Thing is, uboats use theese torpedoes. Torpedo boats do. Some other surface ships as well. Remember, those torpedoes work the WORST if you hit the target straight on. If they can tell their colleagues honestly that 'Well, sorry, half our torpedoes simply did not work, even if they hit. Oh, and of the rest some ran deep enough to go under the target'? Well. Getting it solved now is much easier than later on, when it could be hidden under the excuse of 'wartime secret, our enemies must not know, shut up about it'. It's still peacetime.
If that does not work? Something is very rotten in the state of Denmark. Hoover would almost certainly work, but might actually result in him taking over in the 50's or sixties sometime.
It's even simpler and easier than that. Just get a fishing net with a known length, hold it taut, then have a submarine fire a torpedo with its warhead removed (but an equivalent weight put in its place; this part is key), then see where the torpedo impacts (or cuts through, as the case is likely to be) the net. Lockwood (the eventual commander of the submarine force and initial commander of the subs operating out of Australia) had this test done in Australia with a shoe-string budget, and it was very easy.
The best way to do it is to have the local submarine commander conduct the tests themselves (with an impartial witness), without bothering with permission. The results will shield them from any consequences--the anger will be directed at BuOrd and the Newport Torpedo Station for fucking up something so fundamental with the torpedoes.
As for the magnetic exploder: it's just not going to be fixed to the point of reliability with WW2-era tech. Christie tried for an absurd amount of time; he had technicians try to experiment with ways to fix its problems. None worked at all. Similarly, the British and German magnetic exploders had the same reliability problems and disabled those exploders long before the US entered the war.
Either way, it's a BAD technology unless you can get it to a high point of reliability (which just isn't going to happen); it causes prematures, which knocks the rest of the torpedo spread off target, alerts the target that torpedoes are incoming (and from where), tells the escorts where the enemy sub is, and it sometimes even prematures so close to the firing sub that it causes damage to said sub.
This reveals another problem, though: American torpedoes have less explosive in them than Japanese torpedoes do, which results in less damage (which is a problem). The magnetic exploder was supposed to fix this, but obviously they never even tested the thing. New torpedoes--preferably oxygen torpedoes, to get both speed and the wakeless factor, but electric torpedoes too--should carry more explosive.
Regardless, the submarine force will have other serious problems besides horrible torpedoes. Bad, unimaginative commanders who basically deploy submarines everywhere
except the probable approaches for invasion fleets, don't even attempt to employ wolfpacks, who don't bother to move submarine commands/bases/stations out of the range of enemy air attack, who prioritize putting submarines in the most highly patrolled waters (outside of enemy ports) over putting them in choke points in Japan's merchant shipping (the Luzon Strait in particular, but also off the coasts of Japan) that are not effectively patrolled, etc. Very bad peacetime training which practically enforced extreme cautiousness to the point of absurdity--doctrine which would be promptly thrown out the window basically at the outset of war, in what could only be described as farcical), putting large numbers of submarines in Australia instead of basing them at Pearl Harbor (where it was actually easier, with a submarine tender established at Midway to refuel and rearm subs, to reach Japan and the Luzon Strait)--stretching logistics wastefully and creating friction between commands, lots of submarines being diverted to pointless special missions (like landing token raiding parties, bringing in extremely meager amounts of supplies to besieged forces that would make little difference in the end, etc) at MacArthur's behest (which Nimitz, Lockwood, English, and Christie didn't protest), submarines being sent to act as scouts (not even for major battles, just in general--which is absurdly wasteful and rarely useful), heavy emphasis placed on attacking fast, agile, well-defended warships instead of attacking slow, sluggish, poorly-defended merchant shipping, the Newport Torpedo Station being a complacent group of snobbish and prideful idiots who were incapable of expanding torpedo production to meet wartime demands at any point (or even lending their expertise to held their eventual competition work out the bugs on their electric torpedo), the submarine force commanders telling their sub skippers to fire fewer torpedoes at targets so as to not use up the critically limited supply of torpedoes, rather than going straight to King and saying that there is a crisis and Newport Torpedo Station is not providing
nearly enough torpedoes and that they recommend expanding torpedo production and development outside of NTS immediately, and not nearly
enough submarines in general (an especially sore point, since every seemed to want to use submarines for their own ends, but none of the people who could have advocated for greatly expanded submarine production did so).
1. Saying Marines first and then having Army scream in jealousy is a good way to get Army ordnance management off its ass and buy some.
2. He knows HVARs were a thing. He should know shaped charges were a thing. "Rocket + shaped charge = gud vs armor without much firing recoil" is one more step that I doubt a flag officer is unable to make.
This is not as effective as you think. Shaped Charge rockets only inflict damage in a small area; this is fine against tanks, since tanks are quite small. But warships? You're just not going to do that much damage. Shaped charge weapons don't like spaced armor, and warships have
lots of space and many layers of metal.
About the best thing you could hope for is penetrating the flight deck of a carrier and hitting the avgas lines in several places...or starting serious fires in multiple places (from multiple hits) if there are plenty of fueled and armed planes in the hangar...but then, you'd actually knock out the flight deck with an HE bomb whether or not there were plenty of fueled planes in the hangar. Generally, you would hope to start small fires in lots of places in rapid succession, and hope that overwhelms damage control, sets off ordnance, or knocks out something critical.
That's not to say that they'd be useless, but you're generally better off attacking enemy capital ships with large, AP or SAP bombs and torpedoes. The rockets would probably be preferable against destroyers, submarines, and oilers/tankers, though.
3. *Sarcasm mode* Corsairs firing rockets totally never had any effect on Japanese surface targets.
Not against warships, really.
that's lewd!) her, but before that, basically when Mirai appeared in WW2 in plain sight of IJN Yamato and her escorts. Mirai faked normal WW2 speeds and accelerations until the point where one DD and one CL (IIRC) were almost ready to close Mirai's escape route. At that point, Mirai engaged flank speed and passed between the two ships.
