Torpedo Boats... Fear!

[Kirk's Raider's]

they actually tried that not only with rthe french - spanish navy

documentary:

if someone wants to pursue this feel free to open a thread. i'll move the pertinent posts there

The video is blocked. Definitely a David vs Goliath battle between 3rd world fishermen with speed boats vs twenty plus Navies with all kinds of modern do dad's that the Somalis can only dream of. Even a WWIi Navy would make mince meat of the Somali pirates.
Kirk's Raiders

 

[5fish]

a torpedo then was a mine (some of them mounted on a rather long stick)

Here is a brief look at mine sweeping in the civil war...look under the "devils" the man who invented the Monitor invented one of the first mine sweeping devices...

http://books.google.com/books?id=SdrYv7S60fgC&pg=PA595&lpg=PA595&dq=American+civil+war+minesweepers&source=bl&ots=lYTAxPPxOz&sig=DGlWrzmDiiCaIoDLyOOFQgPDfII&hl=en&ei=cDisTdq_IYvVgAfB54z0BQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&sqi=2&ved=0CBcQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=American civil war minesweepers&f=false

Here is little about Mobile Bay mine clearing operation... It seem they used wooden boats...

http://books.google.com/books?id=lmWLppXvSVoC&pg=PA317&dq=mine+sweeping+Mobile+bay&hl=en&ei=-zusTf3_OaTf0QHO7vHWAQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=5&ved=0CEAQ6AEwBA#v=onepage&q=mine sweeping Mobile bay&f=false


I am finding ships sunk in the Civil war doing minesweeping duties...like the USS Rodolph


Assuming the role of a minesweeper and getting sunk
Diverse and dangerous duties in Mobile Bay and in nearby streams kept the "tinclad" busy until almost the end of the Civil War. The most difficult task facing her and her sister ships was clearing torpedoes (mines) from the captured Confederate waters. On 1 April 1865, as she was towing a barge to assist in salvaging the sunken monitor Milwaukee, Rodolph was herself sunk when she struck a mine in the Blakely River. The explosion killed four men and wounded 11 others.


Here is another ship sunk minesweeping....USS Sciota

Sunk while clearing mines
In November, Sciota was ordered to Pensacola, Florida for repairs. In January 1865, she steamed to Mobile Bay to help clear torpedoes from the waters there. On 14 April, the day of President Abraham Lincoln's assassination, she struck a torpedo and sank off Mobile, Alabama. Her commanding officer, Acting Lieutenant James W. Magune, reported:

"The explosion was terrible, breaking the beams of the spar deck, tearing open the waterways, ripping off starboard forechannels, and breaking fore-topmast."


It seems Mine sweeping operation in the Civil War has been overlooked by Historians.....I just did not find much on the topic...

 

[5fish]

The CSS Squib ... they could have put fear into the union navy... if they had more...

 

[5fish]

That again the tech was there for real torpedo boats if the confederacy had spent money and resources... just some foresight needed...

Snip... wiki... only 8 years after the war...

During the mid-19th century, the ships of the line were superseded by large steam powered ships with heavy gun armament and heavy armour, called ironclads. Ultimately this line of development led to the dreadnought class of all-big-gun battleship, starting with HMS Dreadnought.
At the same time, the weight of armour slowed the battleships, and the huge guns needed to penetrate enemy armour fired at very slow rates. This allowed for the possibility of a small and fast ship that could attack the battleships, at a much lower cost. The introduction of the torpedo provided a weapon that could cripple, or even sink, any battleship.

The first warship of any kind to carry self-propelled torpedoes was HMS Vesuvius of 1873. The first seagoing vessel designed to fire the self-propelled Whitehead torpedo was HMS Lightning. The boat was built by John Thornycroft at Church Wharf in Chiswick for the Royal Navy. It entered service in 1876 and was armed with self-propelled Whitehead torpedoes.

As originally built, Lightning had two drop collars to launch torpedoes; these were replaced in 1879 by a single torpedo tube in the bow. She carried also two reload torpedoes amidships. She was later renamed Torpedo Boat No. 1.[1] The French Navy followed suit in 1878 with Torpilleur No 1, launched in 1878 though she had been ordered in 1875.

Another early such ship was the Norwegian warship HNoMS Rap, ordered from Thornycroft shipbuilding company, England, in either 1872 or 1873, and built at Thornycroft's shipyard at Church Wharf in Chiswick on the River Thames. Managing a speed of 14.5 knots (27 km/h), she was one of the fastest boats afloat when completed. The Norwegians initially planned to arm her with a spar torpedo, but this may never have been fitted. Rap was outfitted with launch racks for the new self-propelled Whitehead torpedoes in 1879.

Snip... wiki... 1864 almost self propelled torpedoes...

A prototype self-propelled torpedo was created by a commission placed by Giovanni Luppis, an Austrian naval officer from Rijeka, then a port city of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Robert Whitehead, an English engineer who was the manager of a town factory. In 1864, Luppis presented Whitehead with the plans of the salvacoste (coastsaver), a floating weapon driven by ropes from the land that had been dismissed by the naval authorities due to the impractical steering and propulsion mechanisms.

Whitehead was unable to improve the machine substantially, since the clockwork motor, attached ropes, and surface attack mode all contributed to a slow and cumbersome weapon. However, he kept considering the problem after the contract had finished, and eventually developed a tubular device, designed to run underwater on its own, and powered by compressed air. The result was a submarine weapon, the Minenschiff (mine ship), the first modern self-propelled torpedo, officially presented to the Austrian Imperial Naval commission on December 21, 1866.

The first trials were not successful as the weapon was unable to maintain a course on a steady depth. After much work, Whitehead introduced his "secret" in 1868 which overcame this. It was a mechanism consisting of a hydrostatic valve and pendulum that caused the torpedo's hydroplanes to be adjusted so as to maintain a preset depth.

 

[5fish]

Here picking up torpedoes/mines form the Crimean war... wiki... read the read the last sentence...

Torpedoes were used by the Russian Empire during the Crimean War in 1855 against British warships in the Gulf of Finland. They used an early form of chemical detonator.
During the American Civil War, the term torpedo was used for what is today called a contact mine, floating on or below the water surface using an air-filled demijohn or similar flotation device. These devices were very primitive and apt to prematurely explode. They would be detonated on contact with the ship or after a set time, although electrical detonators were also occasionally used. USS Cairo was the first warship to be sunk in 1862 by an electrically-detonated mine. Spar torpedoes were also used; an explosive device was mounted at the end of a spar up to 30 feet (9.1 m) long projecting forward underwater from the bow of the attacking vessel, which would then ram the opponent with the explosives. These were used by the Confederate submarine H. L. Hunley to sink USS Housatonic although the weapon was apt to cause as much harm to its user as to its target. Rear Admiral David Farragut's famous/apocryphal command during the Battle of Mobile Bay in 1864, "Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!" refers to a minefield laid at Mobile, Alabama.

NMS Rândunica
On 26 May 1877, during the Romanian War of Independence, the Romanian spar torpedo boat Rândunica attacked and sank the Ottoman river monitor Seyfi.[4] This was the first instance in history when a torpedo craft sank its targets without also sinking.[5