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This is what I meant by the writing being written for people who don't actually understand what's being discussed.
Bombing the pipeline is not possible from a high-flying plane, because when you drop an object out of a high-flying plane and it hits the water at terminal velocity, it crumples. This is flawed on a conceptual level, like proposing a small child 'aim for the water' when jumping out of a plane without a parachute because water is softer than land. At terminal velocities, hitting water is like hitting concrete.
This is the entire reason that the aviation aircraft for anti-submarine warfare are low and slow... and typically dropping things off with parachute, such as sonar pods. But the advantage of aircraft in these situation is their speed on getting to an area to drop items, not their precision. If you're not in a time-sensitive context, such as a pre-meditated emplacement, there's zero advantage to not just dropping something off the side of a boat.
Plenty of people. This is the primary naval / aerial conflict zone of a Russia-NATO baltic scenario. The presumption of air monitoring has itself been a regular argument by those who insisted the US must be responsible by virtue of anyone else would have been detected, and is a primary reason why a boat-based mission has been the most probable form of any deliberate sabotage.
As a deliberate means of targetting the pipeline, with ironic quotes around 'lost'? No, because that's not how these things work on a technical level. This is in the 'making stuff up that sounds plausible to those who don't know better' territory.
Homing torpedoes do not home by magic, they home off of sound- specifically ship or submarine sound profiles- whereas the inactive nordstream wouldn't even had the sound of moving gas. The mk 48, according to wiki, does have wire-guidance capabilities, but this isn't usable with aircraft due to the line breaks. There is no GPS navigation like can be done to guide drones to specific grid coordinates because GPS does not work underwater. There are ways for sound-based navigation underwater... but the mk 48 isn't designed for that sort of navigation, and the thing about sound-based navigation underwater is that anyone can hear it, and yet no one has alleged it in this context. Even as parts of this conspiracy are based around the presence of russian underwater surveillance systems, ie acoustic sensors. Additionally, for a deliberately placed device to 'cosie' itself up to the pipeline, it needs underwater maneuver capabilities beyond forward guidance. Torpedoes are generally good at moving forward, and not very well known for moving sidewise and backwards.
And- to return to why it's really, really stupid- there's no need for the airforce to deliver a mk 48 by air. The mk 48 is a submarine-launched torpedo. Even if you invented all the technical solutions, if you were going to try and torpedo the nordstream, you could just send a submarine to deliver it instead. You could use wires for for guiding the torpedo, you could use the submarine's own navigation systems to get close to the target, you wouldn't need to risk any sort of air or surface-monitoring, and there would be no need to alert any foreign partner that you were doing an operation near the nordstream pipeline or bring in people to the conspiracy.
But that would make too much sense and would ruin the conspiracy... for the sort of people who understand why the proposal doesn't make sense. Hence the point of the article being written for people who wouldn't know when it was talking nonsense.
You are surely aware of glide bombs and such? There's nothing preventing attaching such to a torpedo to allow high deployment. There were likely parachute systems for torpedo deployment.
I was impressed with your criticism, but are you really saying using a submarine, in a very shallow sea the Russians are reportedly monitoring very closely is such a good idea ?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltic_Sea#/media/File:Baltic_drainage_basins_(catchment_area).svg
Baltic Sea is very, very shallow. It's really not a place where large submarines, such as those that have torpedoes can be sneaky.
A pipeline is a line. Parking a torpedo next to a pipeline isn't as hard as getting it to a precise destination. Align with the pipeline side, slowly descend, sink ..
That's the official explanation of why a explosive single use mine clearing ROV ended up lodged under a Nord Stream pipeline.
It got lost during a baltic training exercise and just, through sheer coincidence, ended up under a piece of infrastructure Americans just hate.
This is not only conflating flight profiles, but the navigation implications. The thing about parachute systems is that they're subject to wind drift- which means you're now dropping a torpedo, which can't GPS navigate, to an unknowable GPS grid coordinate, which means that even if you added on blind-navigation systems like gyroscopes that track progression from known points, they wouldn't work because you wouldn't know where you start.
Whereas this problem would be lesser if you flew from a low and slow altitude- to minimize coordinate drift- or just did a non-flight mechanism, like using a boat.
This is really basic capability mismatch that shouldn't be suggested by a senior airforce adviser to the White House.
Compared to using an aircraft? Yes. An aircraft is infinitely easier to monitor and track.
Setting aside the the Russian monitoring capability at that part of the baltic is an allegation unsupported by other parts of the narrative (such as the use of a sonar device as a command detonator- this is exactly the sort of signal underwater detection systems would detect), the reason submarines have difficulty in shallower waters is the vulnerability to active sound systems (ie. sonar).
Who on earth told you that, but not the Russians and the NATO countries that have invested in submarine capabilities for the region for decades?
Again, this isn't how offensive torpedoes work on a technical level. There is no control system to do this, or the mechanical means to know when it is 'aligned' and 'slowly descend.'
This comes back to not knowing the technical capabilities of what's being involved.
If you accept that drift occurred without intent, then it wasn't deliberately placed for the purpose of ending up there, and relying on drift is not credible because there was no plan. Chance events do happen and things that sink do go about the the sea floor until they get stuck. If you reject the premise that it resulted there without deliberate intent, there's no reason to believe it drifted there as opposed to deliberately being placed.
So which is it? You can't have it both ways, that it both drifted and it was deliberate for it to drift exactly there.
You're telling me torpedos have no internal navigation or sense of direction, at all ? That they don't have a depth sensor ?
They likely can't control their buoyancy, but they can descend or ascend at will while moving forward.
Torpedos can probably tolerate significant g-forces, so late deployment of parachutes would mean its eventual position would be in a very small area, well within its possible range.
What 'submarine' capabilities ? Russians build some submarines in Petrograd, but they barely have a naval base there.
They're certainly not going to fool around with submarines there a year after Americans openly declared they can detect submerged subs by their wake even if they're ~200m down. Baltic is barely 60m deep mostly, it's as unsafe place for submarines as you can imagine.
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