Probably the reason why you can’t find threads talking about this is nobody can agree how many A’s to put in “KHAAAAAAAAAN!”
Oh, for what it’s worth, I too don’t get why Kirk would be legitimately angry/upset when he’s just pulled a fast one on Khan (using the most obvious cypher in the history of movies, as I’ve complained about before). You’d think he’d be putting on a show, except with the music and the echoes and the wha-HEY glavin, you’re really supposed to take it on the nose that Kirk is past the boiling point.
Well, that’s because Kirk is such a good actor. The actor that plays Kirk, not so much.
But then the torpedoes would have fallen out of the tubes. And everything on the ship would have fallen off the shelves. The galley would have been a complete mess, for instance.
Can photon torpedoes change course?
Like all things Trek, it depends on the writer. The only instance I can think of where they definitively did was the “A New Country” movie, where the torpedo homed in on the ion trail of the stealthed Klingon BoP.
YES YES YES! This struck me as really bad writing.
Khan doesn’t understand three dimensional combat, but we do, because it’s such an advanced concept, our highly-trained Starfleet officers comprehend the direction we shall call “down.”
By calling attention to it, they make it clear that it isn’t commonplace and ordinary. By making it “something special” they only highlight their own 2-D thinking!
And they made a big deal about modifying the torpedo on the fly to be able to do this. Why wouldn’t all torpedoes be built to do that? A torpedo could have a dozen different ways of tracking a target.