the.com/torpedo
A patient underwater bullet that waits in the dark to ruin somebody's whole battleship.
means A self-propelled underwater missile launched from ships, submarines, or aircraft to strike and sink enemy vessels by detonating against their hulls.
from From Latin 'torpedo,' meaning 'numbness' or 'stiffness' (from 'torpere,' to be sluggish or stiff) — the same root that gives us 'torpid.' The word first named the electric ray, a flat fish that delivers a numbing jolt to anything that touches it. When inventors built a weapon that lurked unseen and delivered a sudden paralyzing shock to ships, the fish's name fit perfectly. Early 'torpedoes' were actually what we'd now call naval mines; the self-propelled version came later in the 19th century but kept the borrowed name.
- named after
- A stingray genus that delivers electric shocks
- first kill
- Sank a Turkish ship in 1878
- top speed
- Some exceed 200 knots via supercavitation
- costly
- Modern ones cost over a million each
hms lusitania — british passenger ship sunk by german u-20 torpedo in 1915, killing 1,198 people
uss arizona — u.s. battleship torpedoed and sunk at pearl harbor on december 7, 1941
mark 48 torpedo — primary anti-ship torpedo used by u.s. navy submarines since 1972