That is indeed the way Bubblehead1980 set the torpedoes up, to the point that even if you "cheat" and use slow speed for the contact pistol that the steerage and depth-keeping are still off more than real life. That is also due to the fact that even with "realistic" settings in the torpedo files, the incidence of a failure is oddly still not high enough. Part of that is the way the DirectX v9 dll files handle "random" in that it chooses almost all "good" percentages first, and then the failures after, such that if it is a 50-50 chance, and you shoot 10, the first five shots work, the last five fail. Lather Rinse Repeat. So with a 70% failure rate, you'll have 3 good, then 7 fails. That might be just the pistol settings, whereas the depth-keeping has a percentage of deviation, and if it is set with only one setting, will always use that, and the percentage it is then "random"... With FotRSU, where we don't have nearly as strong of failure settings, I have had patrols where with 24 torpedo loadout, I had 23 failures. How much was skipper?? How much was torpedoes?? and with the torpedoes, how much was pistol and how much was depth??? If you are close enough to the target, and the pistol impacts, you can at least "hear" the clang and "Torpedo was a dud, sir", if it's not too busy in the game at the time.
btw, why the game treats the premature detonation and/or under-run as the torpedo never existing as far as the targets are concerned, is beyond me. Someone (Faith??) tried to make a mod that would have the ships react to the premature explosions at least, by imparting some damage to a nearby ship. It worked to a point, but did not satisfy the issue. If a ship can "see" a torpedo, and steer to "avoid" it, surely the game can then alert the grouping to a nearby submarine and they can start to helm?? Same with the premature detonation... oh well...