DARPA Hydra: An Unmanned Sub Mothership to Deploy Drones

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."

Japanese Subs

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Japanese Subs

[flyingfsck]

Some of those Jap subs were actually very large and sophisticated. One three hulled (3 tubes) sub surrendered of the East(!) coast of the US after the end of the war and was scuttled by the US Navy. I saw pics of it somewhere long ago. The centre hull held the fold wing plane.