Ships that break in half
A destroyer taking a torpedo used to do the same thing a destroyer taking anything else did: slide under on an even keel. That's not how ships die. Now a torpedoed hull folds in half at the hit — and the way she goes down tells you what killed her.
The jackknife
Put a fish into a destroyer and the hull splits at midships. The bow half rears up out of the water — nav lights pointing at the sky — while the stern folds down and goes under first; the two halves pull apart at the break, secondary explosions rip down the deck over the first few seconds, and a gout of white steam boils up where the break meets the water. It plays out over about ten seconds, so a torpedo kill is a spectacle, not a status change. A ship killed by gunfire still settles and lists the old way — which means you can read the weapon off the death from across the map.
One string on the wire
The whole thing is client cosmetics keyed off a single new piece of information: what sank her. The sink event already had a spare text field, so it now carries the cause — “torpedo” folds the hull, anything else settles it. The break itself is built by clipping the ship's existing voxel geometry at a midships plane into two halves that hinge apart, the same trick a plane's torn-off wing uses. And because two clients might animate the tumble a hair differently, the one decision that has to match — does this hull break at all — is rolled once on the server, so everyone sees the same death.
For now it's the anchored fleet that folds; the player-crewed hulls in the naval theater still settle (they don't yet know which weapon holed them). Paired with the oil slicks that a sinking now leaves behind, a torpedo run finally looks like what it is: the most violent thing that happens on the water.