Torpedo fixed damage but gun RNG damage?

Not gonna get an answer am I.

What does it has to do with the torpedoes fixed damage?
Sanguinarydan is right... Either torps are governed by rng and armour structure as they mentioned, or shells do fixed damage as torps...

Anyway, Sanguinarydan, I would wait for Enya to join us (next week most likely), so she can have a chance to reply personally.

For HE to do full damage its much like tanks where it first has to pen then it can its damage. For instance with a slightly angled target I find HE has low damage values but on broadside shots the damage is usually higher (tragectory of shell also has an effect)

Torps are an interesting mechanic because in the real world torps could still kill ships without needing to penetrate. Exploding against the side of a ship was enough to wreck the bulkheads and could easily snap the keel of even very large ships.

In game we have no real idea how the torp damage is actually figured wrt is it pen based (i don’t beleive it is) and can the explosion be deflected.

I’ve seen many time 0 damage from torps exploding near the bow area of my ships. Got me to thinking that maybe torps are contact damage of a fixed value but that the angle of contact can mitigate the damage, like a HEAT round hitting angled armour, the ennergy is carried away from the target in this case the hull.

Wish we had training rooms so we could just go and figure out all this stuff by ourselves instead of waiting for devs to do give us insight.

There could be many reasons that the torps roll 0 damage those times but it would be nice to know if there is a mechanism there for angling against torps or not. Its happened enough times that I keep trying to angle bow on to torps in slow ships to avoid extra impacts and hope for some elusive 0 damage rolls/hits.

When you land AP shells on on ships there are 4 outcomes: Bounce; Shatter; Penetration; Overpenetration.

A bounce is when your shell hits an armor value that is too significant to even deal partial dmg, resulting in 0s.
A shatter is non penetration hit but still causes small amounts of dmg to the ship, these are those roughly half dmg hits that you see a lot of time when hitting parts of cruisers and battleships with low caliber AP.
A full penetration will deal your full dmg - the ships dmg resistance values. And will deal approximately 1.5x dmg for a citadel hit. The citadel hit multiplyer increases as shell caliber increases,
An overpenetration deals roughly 10-30% dmg based on the ship type. It occurs when your AP pens clean through the part of the ship hit without detonating in it. This occurres most often when hitting superstructures and DDs.

Next up is HE: Shatters; Explosive Damage; Full Penetration.

A HE shell will shatter and deal 0 damage if it hits a portion of the targeted ship that is too thick for the shells caliber explosion radius to penetrate.
HE will deal explosive dmg if it meets that threshold.
Full Penetration of an HE shell results in the maximum damage being inflicted.
To determine HE penetration you take caliber / 6. That is the thickness of armor the HE shell can penetrate. In blitz however it seems that HE mostly only deals the explosive damage and rarely shatters or full pens.

I hope this answered your question.

As a straight up example of the weakness of guns in comparison to torpedoes I just finished a game where the only 14” shells I fired from the Texas (Tier V US premium BB) were HE into a pair of Clemsons (Tier IV US DD). I scored a total of 20 hits with those 14” guns along with a few 5” HE from the secondaries. Neither Clemson sank.

NEITHER. FREAKING. SANK.