Torpedo Boat

The torpedo boat was the great equalizer of late nineteenth-century naval warfare — a small, fast, cheap vessel that could sink a battleship worth a hundred times its cost with a single self-propelled Whitehead torpedo. The concept terrified every major navy: a flotilla of torpedo boats could sortie at night and destroy an anchored capital fleet before the morning watch could respond. Imperial Germany, France, and Russia all invested heavily in torpedo boat flotillas as a counter to British naval supremacy. At speeds of twenty-five to thirty knots, they were nearly impossible to hit with the slow-traversing guns of contemporary battleships. Their weakness was fragility — a single medium-gun hit was fatal — and short range limited them to coastal defense. In the game the torpedo boat is a fast hit-and-run raider, devastating against large warships, but instantly destroyed by destroyers and any dedicated anti-surface combatant.