You're missing the main point. If you sail at the same speed along the same heading long enough for stealth-launched torps to be accurate, you deserve to get torp'd. If you were in open water with no smoke or islands nearby and you didn't detect the DD that hit you, it's your fault.
I can play the Umikaze lob torps and have a fair chance each rount to NOT get spotted the entire game. Especially on open water maps.
BECAUSE:
- Launching torps does not count as shooting so i can drop a set of torps every couple seconds and not care some will hit sooner or later. Irrelevant.
- You can only be spotted from 5.6 km so in the open waters you are basically the apex pradator to the point of smoke being actually harmful to you because it tells the enemy team where you more or less are (as opposed to being permanently invisible). Hell you can even spot higher tier DDs before they spot you and avoid them. Irrelevant.
- You have to move more or less straight to get anywhere and merely bobbing slightely left and right won't help against a torp wall aimed at the general area you are heading towards.
And of course battleships have really bad rudder shift time so once you spot the torps its already too late.
Not true at all. At the ranges you're talking about, even a minor deviation in speed or heading is enough to make them either miss or be much less accurate (and thus making it easier to dodge). It's the exact same thing as juking long range gunnery fire (and yes, you can do that in a BB if you're paying attention instead of playing one-handed while scoped in on the ship you're shooting at).
There are a number of assumptions here:
1. As a BB, you're going to be at the front of the pack with no planes or lighter ships ahead of you to spot targets. If you play like this, it's your fault when you die.
2. As a BB, you're going lone wolf. You deserve every death you get.
3. As a BB, you're spending so much time in binocular view during your reloads that you can't bother to make course adjustments between shots and don't pay attention to last-spotted locations on the map.
4. As a BB, after you spot that first spread, you don't go bow or stern on to where they came from, either to track the DD down or to open the gap and let someone else find the bugger while improving your own chances to evade and decreasing his accuracy.
That third one in particular is usually the culprit when someone whines about torpedoes, both enemy and friendly. I can honestly say that I have never
once been hit by a spread of torpedoes fired in open water from sufficient range that I couldn't detect the DD that fired them. Been shotgunned as I came through a channel, yes. Been plastered by torp bombers, natch. Been taken down by a DD with the guts to get in close while I was in a close-range gunnery duel with other ships, also yes. Died mutual deaths in my DDs when dueling in smoke clouds, heh, yes.
There's no getting around it. If you consistently get hit by DD/CL torpedoes when you're in open water and haven't spotted the ship that launched them, you're bad at the game. I'm just going to be blunt about it. It's almost the same thing as people in WoT complaining about arty when they die after sitting in the same position for three minutes, except that they died to an FV403 scooting around popping shots at people from less than 200m away. That "oh shit" realization that you're not going to dodge is the sort of thing associated with seeing a CL spin their tail around or a DD go side-on when they're 1-2km away, not from seeing the third long range spread coming in from the same place while you're still going in a straight line. :|