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DARPA Wants Distributed Network of Deep Sea Storage Units
Zothecula writes "DARPA has seen the future of naval warfare and it's falling upward. As part of an effort to reduce the logistics of sending equipment into trouble areas, the agency's Upward Falling Payloads project is aimed at developing storage capsules capable of remaining on the deep seabed for years. These would contain non-lethal military assets that could be deployed on the spot years in advance and rise to the surface as needed."
Possible side benefit: they need to research communications systems reliable enough to command the deep sea capsules when needed.
Concrete becomes stronger under compression. There was some experimentation among the smaller nations of the world a few years ago to build inexpensive submarines using concrete hulls since concrete has such good compressive strength. There is no reason why concrete wouldn't make an excellent storage container.
DARPA wants to invent robots that are designed to "rise up"? Sounds like a pretty dangerous precedent to me.
That Ricky and Bubba will be bidding on the storage units if the government doesn't pay the rent?
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Since this Slashdot the title should really be storage containers as the obvious assumption is a storage unit stores data!
Everyone that disagrees with me is a paid shill
All this effort just so a dysfunctional, rag-tag group of strangers can find the armament they need to outfit the rebel military and take back Tampa in 2027.
I guess the system would work exactly the same no matter whether the stored assets are lethal or not. So what is the point of explicitly mentioning non-lethal assets?
if you need karma go back to when this ran 4 days ago and grab some high rated comments.
tagging a story dup in the 'mysterious future' should flag it for review so this doesn't happen.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
When the current cryotograghic algorithms which secure these cracker-jack prizes become easily crackable by script-kiddies, and with future long-range private drones weilding live HD cams, I see a new form of geocaching game on the horizon.
I'll look forward to watching the reruns on Youtube.
Thanks US Military!
Sent from my ENIAC
I recommend they look into Slashdot's Upward Falling Stories, which tend to drop off the front page and then float back up again as a repost.
If this isn't proof that time traveling aliens are running the government, I don't know what is.
From TFA:
Because of the difficulty of retrieving the capsules, DARPA is concentrating on non-lethal assets, so there’s no conflict with treaties involving munitions and their disposal.
I think DARPA is concerned about the politics of potentially leaving dangerous weapons just lying around. They obviously could be used for anything that can be stored for long period of time, if they manage to get them working.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
Because some people might think it a bad idea to leave storage units full of the latest and greatest instruments of death lying around unguarded on the ocean floor. Those people might not have a problem with a bunch of helmets and first-aid kits being treated that way though.
DARPA is trying to build " Upward Falling Payloads". In this earth, everything falls downwards, not upwards. This is true whether we talk of shit or payloads.
If you are trying to build something to fly in the air, the spec should resemble that of an airplane.
Something that stays under water for long should be a submarine.
DARPA seems to be designing a submarine that flies, or an airplane that sinks. The whole project stinks.
foundation west...
foundation Mariana Trench
It's a good idea since the middle east bastards are about to start WWIII....
Ocean explorers recover a remarkably well-preserved, ancient artifact from the deep mud of the ocean floor.
"What the hell is it??"
"I don't really know. It must be newer than the geological data indicate. We have no record of any prior advanced civilizations."
Sent from my ENIAC
"deployed years later" .. isn't there a risk that the equipment would be obsolete? Field equipment is changing rather rapidly in this day and age, especially electronics.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
At least theoretically, if they put a giant red cross on a submarine full of band-aids, other nations wouldn't depth charge it?
Although "obviously" if the US were about to invade a country they'd be out there trying to blow up the storage boxes, wasting time and ammo?
Non-lethal = when a fishing trawler hauls it off the seabed they can't claim insurance costs etc for their ship blowing up? Also if "everyone knows" subsea storage is all non-lethal (yeah like thats gonna happen long term) then the US is somewhat less liable for EOD costs. Hauling up a net of fish, lobsters... and a mine... is kinda scary to the crew.
So the CIA will trade arms to the afgahani's for heroin, who will sell it to the italians for cash to pay for black ops or wtf the CIA does with all its money. So, "obviously" if you accidentally capture a container and its full of AK47s, we "never" put lethal arms in one, so it was all a plant to make the USA look bad, or all a fake. In other words practically all of them are going to be full of non-domestic arms with the serial numbers filed off or whatever, but we'll pretend none are.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Just how long can a Marine Division wait on the ocean floor and still be effective?
Shaggy Man's body is indestrucible.
My other sig is extremely clever...
Do I understand right that DARPA is basically going to preventively infest the world with some kind of bombs or other weaponry so that they can use them faster once needed?
...only want a pink unicorn, which is much cheaper to produce (e.g. by spray-painting a pony and gluing a plastic horn to its head) and overall more useful than deep sea storage units. But guess who will get once more what they want...
If we can't find any, we'll create some...
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
I had an idea like that a while back, as a way to stash personal stuff out of sight for long periods. Seal (e.g. weld) the stuff in a box with a microphone, piezo beeper, low powered microprocessor, and lithium battery pack inside. There are lithium chloride batteries (e.g. Tadiran) that can supply small amounts of current for decades, and an 8-bit CMOS processor uses just a few microamps at low speed (think of digital watches). The box would just sit quietly on the bottom listening for a certain 128-bit series of beeps. When it heard the beeps it would start beeping itself, making it easy to find with scuba gear (sound carries well under water). You'd get within a few hundred yards of it using GPS or a sextant, start sending out the secret beep code til it started chirping back at you, then retrieve it.
I never seriously tried to build such a thing (too James Bondish and I don't have anything warranting such measures) but it seemed like a cute idea at the time. I might as well write about it now.
Possible side benefit: they need to research communications systems reliable enough to command the deep sea capsules when needed.
The navy has had this ability for quite some time. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extremely_low_frequency
Just another day in Paradise
isn't this how the aliens "invaded" in the latest 'War of the Worlds' movie with Tom Cruise?
Dear America, Please don't mine the entire ocean with giant non-robotic sea mines, just because you can, signed, the rest of the world. Also, didn't we have this conversation last week?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmoline
Like buying presents for children, there's really no way of knowing whether the DoD will in the future be able to make use of whatever they stash away, or whether it will still be edible, nonobsolete, or even free of rust and bilgewater.
So along with the Great Northern beans and networking nodes with 10,000-day vulnerabilities, let's add some historical memorabilia. Copies of current Navy regulations and 12 year old scotch for example.
Another possibility is that DARPA could plant stuff designed to be found by the enemy. Trick black soap. Bogus ciphers that will cause the enemy to spend years or decades fruitlessly attempting to decode. Bogus mine-defusing instructions that will make them go boom.
As a long-time RTS fan, I love this idea. Ok, grudgingly, no guns in it.
Still, "if you find yourself in a fair fight, you haven't done your homework." Given history, I'm fine with the US spending as much as the next 20 nations combined. It's freaking cheap compared to a real war.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Fisherman: Sir, I found them just floating in the water, sir
Police officer: Kareem, you know me. Don't make me break your jaw bone. Tell me did you get them from the ashram-e-talbi group?
Fisherman: Sir, no sir. I was just fishing sir. My net got trapped in something on the seabed sir. I jumped down and dived in, and saw it was caught in some kind of handle sir. I twisted the handle, released the net, came up for air, I was floating in the middle of so many bazookas and rifles and RPGs etc etc, Sir, Honest sir. That is what happened sir.
Police officer: Not even asham group is going to coach this story. It is too dumb. You must be getting it from the stupid zulficar-e-islami group. They are the really weird ones. Now have a nice conversation with my billy club and after you pick your teeth from the floor, you will tell me exactly where you got it all from. OK?
Fisherman: Sir, no sir, yes sir, no sir. it is the truth sir.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
In other words:
"We are famously over-stocked on items that we are not actually using because of huge budget allocations. We don't want to lose those budget numbers and the goverment is saying we need to buy their defense contractor friends' goods. The plan is to just purchase a billion dollars of equipment and just sink it never to be seen again. Everybody wins, except maybe the taxpayers."
--Tirian
That explains all the mysterious food drops on the island.
Namaste!
what "assets" won't be obsolete in 10 years maybe, and definitely 20? Gloves? Shoes? Certainly not weapons or electronics. Sounds like the military needs a reason to bury something on a regular basis, but it's not equipment.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
I don't get it.
http://www.benthos.com/undersea-acoustic-release-modem-SMART-SM75.asp
The article must be glossing over what makes this unique. Do they want a factor of 10 reduction in price? I've been working on the problem of cheap deep water electronics for nearly a decade so this is relevant to my interests(honestly who in the field of oceanography hasn't? Nobody wants to pay a ship to go un-fuck a $100 science project and mass production of gizmos is not the core competency of scientists in most cases).
DARPA is essentially throwing up their hands at the problem of locomotion and saying it's cheaper from an energy standpoint to just pepper the ocean with lots of sensors than to transport a single sensor over lots of territory pushing water out of the way of its course. "Sensors" is a pretty broad catch-all for payload and can vary in price significantly, impacting the truth of that assertion.
Changing batteries isn't cheap so disposable is desirable. Why not just embed a cell phone in a block of epoxy or polyurethane? It is cheaper to drop ballast than it is to displace 100ATM of water, so they might as well settle on a solenoid fired shear pin or electric door strike type mechanism. Syntactic foam and you can do the whole thing with a cheap prepaid, a pic processor, and a solar cell. Battery life scales with price so that is a matter of mission endurance priorities.
are a million to one he said. The chances of anything coming from Mars are a million to one - but still they
come!
Prior Art, just need to work on the sinking, rising on command part.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
I had to check my calendar when I read this - is it April already? The one datum missing from the OP was the intended size of the capsules... so I presume that if they are "too" big, then they may not be portable by aircraft.
However... Anyone with sidescan sonar [and it's not *that* expensive] should not have too much difficulty in locating these caches, no matter where the US Navy chose to drop them. Moreover, there are plenty of other governments - to say nothing of a growing number of oceanic treasure hunters - with the means, motive an opportunity to release such chambers from their resting place, just to get at the contents. Yes, they could be protected with booby-traps, but this brings a risk to legitimate users if the goal is truly long-term storage. Stroll over the top with your military-spec side-scan... Send in a spy sub with a thermal lance to cut the restraints, tow the thing away...
but here's the rub... It's implicit that any deep-sea storage system that involves buoyant containers that rise to the surface on receipt of a signal are going to have to float. [Well, duh]. But if they float, why not just chuck a few of 'em in C17 transporters, wait until you need them, and just fly them out to where your ships are? Subtle? Well, OK, no, I'll concede that... Question: when was the last time you saw a subtle US Navy Task Force? More importantly, having a rapid-response solution backed by air-drop-to-sea-pickup gives you a level of flexibility that long-term storage just can't match.
And the US Military want to spend taxpayer money on this, when just days ago the political talk was all about the "Fiscal Cliff" and dire events if agreements were not reached? Belts are tight. We get that. Numerous western nations [much of Europe as well as the US] are struggling with budget deficits. Yet here we are, discussing the fact that the Navy wants to play bob-the-apple with deep-sea supply canisters.
To quote Mark (Dr. Bruce Banner) Ruffalo: "That's about as crazy as a bag of cats..."
Haven't fully woken up yet, waiting for caffeine to kick in. Read the title as "Deep Sea Storage Urchins" ...
When can we put Bruce Willis into storage?
sed -i '' -e 's/fall/float/g'
FTFY