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DARPA Is About To Start Testing an Autonomous, Submarine-Hunting Drone (vice.com)
merbs writes: Early next year, DARPA will begin testing a 132-foot unmanned submarine-hunting ocean drone in San Diego. Slapped with the cumbersome title of Anti-Submarine Warfare Continuous Trail Unmanned Vessel (ACTUV), it's designed to do exactly that: track stealth submarines from the surface, quietly and autonomously. "The 132-foot-long, 140-ton ACTUV is being built by Leidos at the Vigor Shipyard [formerly Oregon Iron Works] in Clackamas, Ore. The vessel is about 90 percent complete. The hardware of the systems is complete, with software being engineered presently." Using one of these drones would cost "about $15,000 to $20,000 per day, compared with a destroyer that costs about $700,000 per day to operate."
Just wait until the software has a glitch and it zeroes in on a container carrier or a cruise ship and blows it out of the water.
But don't worry- I'm sure that'll be fixed in ver. 2.0, after it sinks half the ships in the Atlantic Ocean.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
I think you just invented the torpedo...
Hull speed, for one thing. The speed in knots of a displacement hull is roughly 1.3 * sqrt(length at waterline in feet). So ~4 knots for a 10 ft hull. A modern sub can do 30 knots.
Never mind the sea-keeping problems of a 10 ft boat in open ocean swells.
Imagine a sea of cars, as far as the eye can see.
Now imagine a container, enclosing carless space.
The container will be less dense than the surrounding car-ness, and hence bouyant. This is that, but with water instead of cars. Also it hunts submarines and is an unmanned vehicle.
Anti-Submarine Warfare Continuous Trail Unmanned Vessel (ACTUV)
To all our American friends. I have always admired your ability to invent insanely complicated and nonsensical names for things in order to produce a nice ancronym but now I am quite frankly disappointed. This one compares badly to your usual work, it is mediocre at best. You guys really need to get your act together.
The USs tech advantage is most pronounced in combat aircraft and subs. Enabling a tech that cheaply hunts/kills subs substantially attacks that advantage.
Not that it would stop development if DARPA didn't do it, but this tech probably has the largest potential to harm the US of any country. Considering our sieve-like computer security and that apparently every advanced tech the US develops seems to be almost instantly aped by China and/or Russia, DARPA's essentially doing research for them.
-Styopa
The maximum speed is what he is referring to. You can go faster on the water, by planing (essentially skipping across the surface) but heavy or deep hulls do not plane, and so are limited to the maximum hull speed above, regardless of the power of the engines.
If only we could fall into a woman's arms without falling into her hands
Wouldn't it be really easy for an enemy to attack these? They're on the surface, so any flying drone can spot them and destroy them. Looks to me like these will only be useful in peace time, if you want to know where the Russian and Chinese subs are without any actual conflict going on. If a war starts, it will be like shooting fish that are floating on top of a barrel.
Depending on the sea state, finding a small boat in miles of ocean can be a seriously difficult problem. I suppose if you know where the submarine the thing is following is the problem is much easier, but as others have pointed out, sending out a search/destroy mission pretty much going to be a dead give away that there really is a submarine here.
Also, this is a passive system, meaning that the submarine is unlikely to be able to tell they are being monitored. So do you just give away your position because there is a chance the adversary already knows? I don't think so, at least not until you are sure something is shadowing you, and at that point you change tactics and start working on getting away if you can.
However, this all makes me wonder what this will be used for. We already have a fairly good idea what's going on under the oceans now. We have very sensitive listening devices all over the oceans and are capable of quickly placing a bunch of temporary listening posts if the need arises. I'm not so sure these passive trackers are going to be all that useful, except that they can be sent into an area for a few days to detect possible submarine operations with a bit more detail, without causing suspicion. This is totally different than just tracking a single boat...
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
How do you propose the submarine call in an air strike? Dial somebody up on the captain's cell phone?
Anytime a submarine needs to communicate, it risks giving away it's position. Radio communications require putting *something* above the water and anything you do that with is subject to detection, both physically as well as through direction finding of the RF signals required. Yes, submarines *can* do this sort of thing, but it's pretty much assumed that when they do, they have given up their position to somebody, and that's usually a bad tactical move.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101