Fire and forget: How do you stop a torpedo? With a better torpedo.

That urgency drove many of the innovations in how the vehicle was made, such as using simulation-based design to test and refine their ideas. “Simulations allow you to quickly assess a design without building it and testing it in water, which can be very expensive and take time,” says Burkhardt.

Simulations also made it possible to design all the sections of the torpedo — each carrying different components such as the power supply or navigational instruments — independently. That meant the sections could all be worked on at the same time, rather than following the usual, more time-consuming process of working on one at a time. If one section was ready for testing before the others, the simulation filled in the missing pieces.

To top off this modular construction process, the team came up with a new way to put all the sections together. Rather than being connected by cables, as with other torpedoes, the CAT’s communications and electrical connections at the ends of each section are joined by pins in what’s called a “blind mate” arrangement:  The operator doesn’t even need to see the pins to align and connect them.

As well as saving time, doing so much of the design via simulations trimmed costs. “This is one of the most inexpensive weapons, given what it is,” says Watson. “Compared to any of its predecessors, it’s probably a half to a third of the cost — because of the way it was designed, because of how easy it is to assemble.”

Once they built physical prototypes of key pieces of the vehicle, the group began tests in ARL’s water tunnel, one of the best facilities of its kind in the country. After live trials at sea, the new torpedo defense system began a test deployment on the supercarrier USS George H.W. Bush in March 2013. It has now been installed on four other ships.

Although the ARL has been one of the Navy’s go-to partners for research on undersea weapons systems since the mid-1940s, its story is not well known, says Burkhardt, in large part because much of its work is classified, and employees simply can’t talk about it.

That restriction also means that the engineers and scientists who worked on the CAT — 250 individuals, at the project’s peak — can’t do one of the major things university researchers are expected to do. “They’re not allowed to publish,” says Watson. “They give up that opportunity when they come here to work on these projects.”

“There’s a lot of pride with this group, and we love talking about it,” says Burkhardt. “It’s important for people to know that we are doing good things here.”

This story first appeared in the Spring 2017 issue of Research/Penn State Magazine.