Babcock develops innovative anti-torpedo system

Every submarine film has that moment. The moment when a torpedo is launched towards the submarine. There’s the tension. The panicked looks. The pings of the sonar. The focused concentration. And someone, always, ends up shouting ’Dive! Dive! Dive!’ as the submarine takes evasive action.

While evasive manoeuvres are important for avoiding torpedo attack, for the past decade or so, the marine defence sector has been developing anti-submarine countermeasures. These are devices that can be launched from the submarine to trick the torpedo’s tracking system into following them, rather than the target.

However, finding ways to launch these devices has proved rather difficult. A team from Babcock has now come up with a new type of launcher, designed with safety as a priority, which can be retrofitted onto the current submarine fleet to provide an extra layer of protection against a form of attack that all submariners hope will never come.

Torpedos hunt acoustically, explained Jeff Owens, future business director for Babcock’s Marine and Technology Division. ’If there’s a torpedo coming towards you, you want to put a countermeasure in the water that “looks” very much like you do from the torpedo’s point of view, so that you can then quietly move away from the torpedo,’ he told The Engineer.