DARPA Hydra: An Unmanned Sub Mothership to Deploy Drones 78
garymortimer tips more news about the rise of our robotic overlords. DARPA is now investigating military drone submarines as launch platforms for UAVs. Quoting John Keller at Military & Aerospace Electronics: "The Hydra program will develop and demonstrate an unmanned undersea system with a new kind of unmanned-vehicle delivery system that inserts UAVs and UUVs stealthily into operational environments to respond quickly to situations around the world without putting U.S. military personnel at risk. The Hydra large UUV is to use modular payloads inside a standardized enclosure to deploy a mix of UAVs and UUVs, depending on the military situation. Hydra will integrate existing and emerging technologies in new ways to create an alternate means of delivering a variety of payloads close to where they're needed, DARPA officials say."
Re:Proof! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Japanese Subs (Score:4, Informative)
This reminds me during WW2 Japenese developed subs that could surface and open a tiny hangar which launched 1-3 small planes. Sometimes scouts, sometimes bombers. The planes could land on water next to the sub, which had a crane to lift the plane back into the hangar.
they were intended to drop incendiary bombs on forests.
Re:Japanese Subs (Score:4, Informative)
they were intended to drop incendiary bombs on forests.
There was also a plan to attack the Panama Canal. One of the airplanes is preserved at the National Air & Space Museum.
Re:Japanese Subs (Score:5, Informative)
There was a good story told at the National Air & Space Museum about that plane. One of the Japanese pilots came to the museum and looked the plane over. He was asked about the "optional" floats that would allow the plane to land. The researchers of the plane did not understand where the floats would be stored on the submarine, as the submarine was pretty small and packed very tightly. The pilot replied that they never took floats and that the plane was never supposed to ever come back.
Pretty sobering. I believe the example that's in the National museum was recovered from a factory just after the war.