Victory as an ASW platform… are those old ships quiet? I don't know if they are loud, quiet, or average. And I certainly don't now how you'd mount the sonar!
Strike that. Quick conversation with (redacted) tells me Victory would be very quiet for all the reasons you'd expect – no propeller, slow, little machinery, lots of ship above the water line shedding acoustic energy, and most of the sounds made on an old ship are not the kind that carry and certainly not the kind passive sonar processors are looking for.
Hull mounted sonar is out, but at those low speeds a towed array is idea. These require just 1-10kW, so you'd need a way to generate that which wouldn't create too much noise, but that's a lot less power than I thought might be necessary.
And you could just drop modern homing torpedoes into the water, fancy tubes would not be necessary, just a cable from the sonar to the torpedo to pass on some targeting info.
Sorry to sidetrack the thread, but that idea really grabbed me.
's motivation to paint Napoleonic ships returns!
