When I was a child, I played a DOS game called Silent Hunter I. Basically, it's a submarine warfare game which you play as a U.S. Navy submarine in World War II

When I was a child, I played a DOS game called Silent Hunter I. Basically, it's a submarine warfare game which you play as a U.S. Navy submarine in World War II, cursing the Pacific Ocean and attacks Japanese warships. When playing the game, I was extremely frustrated about the Mark XIV torpedo onboard - After going through the painstaking process of calculating the projectile, hitting the fire button, I would watch the stopwatch and hoping for the best that the target won't change its course... finally it was the time... nothing! For every five fires or so, there would be one or two torpedoes that never explode - when you need it the most. I was not playing the "hard" mode, it happens even in a "moderate" difficulty setting. I thought the game developers were making it unreasonable. And a few years later, I learned from a history book about the early unreliability of the torpedoes, and realized the torpedoes in the game were an accurate and realistic depiction of its historical performance. Kudos to the game developers. Another tool in the game I felt strange was the "Torpedo Data Computer", which is something that you can simply enter the bearing, speed, etc., of your target via its tuning dials, and the machine automatically calculates the firing position for you. I thought it was just the hand-waving of the game developers to make the game more playable while making it unrealistic - why would a computer even exist in the 1940s? I believed it was all pencil-and-paper. Later I learned it was real as well - totally mind-blowing. When I was a kid, I had no idea about the sophisticated historical mechanical fire control computers in the 1930s-1940s. There is a Hacker News submission of the documentation of the computer. [0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12785113 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12785113