"The magnetic detonators were an epic fail, especially as the contact pistol also sucked. The submarine torpedoes ran deep and are prone to circular runs." is not exactly technical knowledge for anyone who learnt about WWII Pacific Theatre submarine performance, and I'm sure there's enough history taught at navy school to cover THAT...
Did you... actually read the torpedo I was citing? The Mark 13, which was the air-dropped torpedo, and shared an engine and a gyroscope with the much more problematic Mark 14/15 near-twins.
The Mark 8 Contact Exploder is not a component of the Mark 6 Magnetic Influence Detonator. It's a completely different piece of hardware.
And while knowing the problem is great and all... once the admiral at BuOrd who was quashing the test got canned, figuring out the problems didn't take very long. Figuring out a solution (Which, again, is one of those fiddly technical things that the best thing for Thompson to do is stay the fuck out of the way).
"hey to fix the torps stop using the mag detonator and make the contact one able to handle the g forces from impact"
Okay. How do you make the contact pistol handle the impact forces? That's the part that takes a while.
You can rig a fix that works most of the time by increasing the spring rate on the firing pin, or replacing it with an aluminum one, but that's a stopgap measure.
Because the scientists are such closed-minded ivory tower idiots that they cannot possibly undergo the following process:
Scientist A: "Oi, you did the math on that idea from higher up yet?"
Scientist B: "Yeah, the calculations work."
Scientist A: "Huh, might be on to something there."
Scientist B: "Well, they worked since the higher ups said to assume the parts all worked within required parameters."
Scientist A and B: *shares a look, then burst into uproarious laughter*
Scientist C: "Wait, you don't think the higher ups are actually going to try making us build such a thing, do you?"
Scientist A: *chokes on own saliva*
Scientist B: "They'll want something reliable, we don't need to worry about that."
...Right.
Right... except, and hang on to your pants here,
Thompson does not have relevant expertise. They are going to be no more inclined to waste time doing the math on the basis of something he says than on the basis of something some random dude off the street says, because, once again,
he doesn't have relevant expertise. Thompson is a
tactician, not a
physicist or
nuclear engineer. The scientists are not going to listen to higher ups saying "assume all parts work within required parameters", because it's already known that if all parts of an implosion bomb work as expected, the thing will work, and none of the people in their chain of command would ever give such an idiotic order.
This whole scenario makes it amply clear you have never worked in a university-level laboratory and are just blowing hot air out of your ass because you refuse to admit that the progression of the Manhattan project is something Thompson is unable to realistically affect. In this environment, working with very experimental, poorly understood technology you don't assume
anything like that. Everything is rigorously tested.
Everything.
As for nukes basically the same thing. I can't remember last time I read a book that talked anything about them without it mentioning that one was a gun-type device and the other was implosion.
I didn't know whether Little Boy and Fat Man were gun-type or implosion until this whole moronic argument got rolling. I knew both types existed, but didn't know the advantages of one over the other, because frankly it never interested me or mattered to me, and I was rather well versed in a lot of the technical details of a lot of WW2-era weapons systems and engineering plants.
EDIT: Didn't see Sky had already posted. Sorry.
