It's generally basic situational awareness. Not many ships carry torpedoes, and only IJN DDs can launch torpedoes before they're seen. The moment you realize there's a ship present that is capable of launching on you, you really ought to be taking steps to mess up their launch calculations. Torpedoes travel in a straight line up until their maximum range, and simply varying speeds and moving the rudder back and forth will cause them to miss.
Furthermore, the moment torpedoes enter your detection range, an icon denoting where they are appears on your HUD, triangles appear in the water where they are, and there is an insistent beeping that grows louder as the torpedoes get closer. For most ships, that means there's sufficient time to pull hard on the rudder and evade the worst of the damage, or even pull parallel to the torpedo tracks and drive between them. Torpedoes can be easily dodged outside of a minimum-range point-blank launches. As for minimum-range launches...well, that's typically the player's fault for letting a torpedo-armed ship get that close.
Now plane-dropped torpedoes are another matter. The general counter to this is to always have your nose pointed towards any torpedo squadrons as much as possible, and find a friendly cruiser to sail near.
Note that with OBT - your crew will now call out the location of torpedoes (ahead, astern, port, starboard).
/u/limitbroken
To expound on planes, since dealing with torpedo bombers can be a little complicated until you're familiar with how they work: TBs have a minimum distance that they need to be beyond to lock into their final run prior to dropping torps. Any TB within about ~2.2km of you and flying at you or on a vector that intersects your path is almost certainly already locked into its final run: at this point, unless you're a DD or a very agile CA you need to be pointing as close to dead on at or dead on away from them as possible to dodge the full spread. Once it's over the threshold and locked into its run, it'll dip, drop torps, fly ridiculously close to you, and then either turn immediately back towards the CV or continue to its next waypoint if it has one. Plane torps still have an arming range, too, so if they make a particularly aggressive manual drop and misread how close you are or how narrow your turning radius is, you can sometimes bonk them harmlessly.
Any TB making an indirect approach or pass inside this minimum distance is one of four things:
- the CV making a ballsy and likely ill-considered redirect for a different torp run right over you (possibly because he knows your AA sucks or he out-tiers you enough that it doesn't matter): ctrl+click his air group and try to blow it out of the sky, shaking your fist impotently if he knows he's got you beat
- the CV being blind as a bat and flying straight over you en route to something else: ctrl+click his air group and blow part of it out of the sky so the next guy has less to worry about
- the CV botching a manual run by trying to assign or change the drop target while his plane is already past the run threshold, causing it to bounce and try to do a slow fly around so it can try to attempt the run a second time, which it will probably also botch because plane AI is dumb as bricks: ctrl+click his air group and blow it out of the sky, and laugh at his failure
- the CV somehow managing to botch an automatic run by changing its vector while it's too close but not locked in, or you managing to steer such that you screw its vector up entirely: ctrl+click his air group and blow it out of the sky, and laugh at his misfortune, and also that he auto-drops
The big takeaway here is that you can generally figure out if a set of TBs is coming at you from at least 5km away - even if you're alone so they can come from any direction AND they're competent enough to make indirect long passes and then divert into flanking torpedo runs, they still have to deal with plane turning radius AND minimum distance which all contributes to telegraphing their intent. For all but the slowest ships, this is a pretty fair amount of time to designate them primary secondary/AA target and begin maneuvering. Even if you don't blow the entire air group out of the sky, every plane you take down is another torp that you're not going to have to dodge. For spreads that aren't just every TB dropping on you in the same vector at the same time, this can mean the difference between getting splattered and escaping mostly without harm.
Sometimes you're still going to get caught in what's basically a cat's cradle of torpedo f***ery, where they get a crossing run from both sides, and sometimes throw another one down in front of you just to spit on your corpse and catch you out turning into one of the others. Pretty much every CV wants to do this to you, whether they actually get to depends on how much other shit is going on around them, how many allied fighters are dogging them, and how much AA you have around you. The easiest solution is to never have to deal with this by staying with a pack and keeping at least a CA around (or being the CA) - the AA booster that starts showing up on tier 6+ CAs is not just extra good at shitting on planes, but also causes the spread to blow up even larger with more holes to sneak through and a better chance of turning a 6x+ torp hit run into a 1x/2x. Fighters do the same thing to whatever unit they're attacking, for whatever that's worth to you.
If you missed the inbound run or things went wrong some other way and they've got you dead to rights and turning seems hopeless and you have no idea what to do, come to a full stop. Pretty much all TBs drops are going to be leading you to some degree, so at least this way you're not going to sail right into some more torpedoes and absolutely certain death, just mostly certain death.
I'm sleep deprived so this was all pretty babbly but whatever, take this if you can't be bothered to read the whole thing:
TL;DR:
- ctrl+click to designate TBs as your primary AA target when they get within AA distance of you, no matter where you think they're going
- watch their approach vector(s) and steer accordingly
- you can see the trajectory of their run long before torps hit the water
- if they catch you out and you're f***ed anyway, try coming to a full stop, it might help a bit
- please forget all of these tips if you wind up against me in a game, thanks
And as an additional note - plane AI coming in on auto-drop doesn't really like it when their target is turning, and will drop a very weird spread that is extremely easy to dodge. So keep on turning when you see planes approach
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