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What?
edit"On 10 and 11 March, the prospective submarine shot 12 dummy torpedoes into the Thames River, Connecticut, from each of the boat's four tubes. " I'm not even sure what this means. March of what year? Why is is a "prospective submarine"? From the context I think it means that after the boat was launched in 2003, they did some weapons tests with it in March, launching some practice torpedoes in the Thames, before it was delivered to the Navy and commissioned as an actual warship, hence "prospective submarine". And does it really mean to say that they launched FORTY EIGHT dummy torpedoes? That seems kind of unlikely. I'm thinking it's a lot more likely that they launched a TOTAL of 12 dummy torpedoes, using each of the four tubes, so three each. In any case such an event would be a pretty minor part of the test program, since as far as I know the torpedo tubes are the same old technology that we've been using right along. They didn't need to be specially proven. I should think that they did a lot more work testing the conformal sonar arrays, photonics mast, propulsion system, digital boat controls, and all the other untried technology. The torpedo tubes are like the one part of the ship that they could be sure were going to work.