Robotic Gliders Soar Underwater

zymano writes "Yahoo has this tech news on ocean gliders that can go on journeys for hundreds of miles and last for weeks using pumps that push ballast water in and out to subtly change their buoyancy. This enables them to alternately rise and fall through the ocean as they glide forward. Oh , $60,000 if you want one." See our previous stories for more information.

Comments

Re:I wonder

[dbavirt]

They don't run on ocean currents. By changing their bouyancy, they provide a downward or upward force, which is translated to a forward force via the wings.

Re:Imagine the possibilities

[arivanov]

From mine sweeping to hunting down enemy subs

No. That is not the obvious use. The obvious use will be delivering a nuclear (or large conventional) payload in the middle of an enemy port undetected. These things can be made as stealthy as the submarines never ever got. They make no noise. They can be made to have near zero magnetic signature. If you are not in a hurry they can go half the way acrosss the pacific if needed.

Fsck... The possible applications outright scare me. And at 60K they are only a fraction of the price of a missile. The only problem is navigating in shallow water, but this can be solved as well at around 60 more K.

these would make lousy weapons

[sbma44]

Yes, Hunt For Red October has taught us all that you've got to be vewy vewy quiet when you're on a sub, lest your noise be picked up by the other guy's passive sonar and used to find your position.

But that's for sub-to-sub situations, when both guys want to hide their location. If instead of a submarine you're manning, say, Miami, then your best efforts to hide your location are probably still going to fall short. So you can use active sonar to find these things. And then blow them up with torpedoes or depth charges.

Which shouldn't be too hard, given that the ferrari of the class moves at 5 mph. And there's not even any guarantee that these things can work in shallow water. Who even knows what "shallow" is in this case? I wouldn't be surprised if their effectiveness is crippled as soon as they run into a continental shelf -- keeping them quite a good ways off-shore. It seems logical to assume that their efficiency drops off the more up-and-down cycles they have to employ, and the smaller the surface/seabed pressure differential is.

Finally, delivering nukes by sea is not a good way to get the most value from your military-industrial dollar. My understanding is that for maximum wrath-of-god effect, you'd want to blow a nuclear weapon up in the atmosphere over your target -- hence MIRV's horrible destructiveness. Ground level is not where you want to detonate. And certainly not at sub-ground level, in the middle of a gigantic heat-and-radiation absorber.

Admittedly, you are not going to save your city by keeping that nuke covered with 10 feet of water. But it's just one more strike against this as a weapon-delivery system. (Bonus Simpsons paraphrase: "Three month ocean voyage? But I'm mad now!"). A good-old fashioned cargo container would be easier to obtain, easier to retrieve, and only somewhat easier for the feds to detect.