The Controversial Nature of Millennium Challenge 2002

[TheRomanSlayer]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002

The Millennium Challenge exercise of 2002 was primarily meant to test the US military's transformation into a new kind of warfare where high technology would be used heavily to change the outcome of the battle. However, the most notable thing about the exercise was that retired Marine Corps officer Paul Van Ryper was placed in charge of the "Red" forces with a technological disadvantage. Van Ryper would use what limited resource he had to launch a surprise attack, inflicting huge casualties on the "Blue" forces, securing a shocking upset victory for him. However, The "Blue" forces had to constantly reset the game and imposed certain changes in the rules that frustrated the retired Marine to the point where he resigned from it, and later gave his criticism of the exercise, saying that the simulation had become a 'scripted exercise' that would allow the "Blue" forces to win.

Although I'm not really well versed on the more technical side of the military affairs, I would have thought that MC2002 would have given the US military leadership a big knock on the head about the potential downsides of being overreliant on high technology for their military campaigns. It would only take one EMP or any technological jamming to hinder their ability to wage war. Chozen from Cobra Kai sums it up like this: "if the enemy insists on war, you take their ability to wage it". Basically, electronic jamming is the technological equivalent of chi blocking or some other disabling technique.

Any thoughts?

 

[Bear Ribs]

A bit of Van Riper's complaints were true but much of it was nonsense.

Wargames are constrained in area and time compared to real-life wars. You cannot shut down an entire nation nor extend the games for months, they have to take place in a small area for convenience's sake and have to take place in a limited amount of time for the same reason. Normally the people running the tests acknowledge this and don't minmax by taking advantage of those limitations to cheat.

Van Riper cheated. Things like sending all his communications via bike messengers and semaphore, that works fine in a constrained tiny environment for a wargame. Across a nation the size of Iraq or Iran coordinating complex multi-pronged maneuvers he was doing, from inside a bunker a hundred miles from the front lines? Ha ha, no, you don't remotely have the flexibility to do that with bike messengers carrying written orders. Similarly, he inflicted massive damage with explosive-equipped kamikaze speedboats which is a tactic an enemy nation might try, but those enemy nations wouldn't get to start a war with a huge swarm of pre-armed speedboats right next to the US Navy, that only worked because of the space constraints and him knowing when the exercise would begin*.

Van Riper complained that he was forbidden to use Chemical Weapons but as General William Kernan explained in his interview, they had 36 hours to conduct the ground operations part of the wargame and if chemical weapons were on the ground at the landing zone, the army would simply not land there and choose another landing zone, an enemy can't gas his entire nation after all, and outside of the wargame constraints they could wait out the chemicals, deploy countermeasures, or just land somewhere else. None of those options could be used due to time and space constraints on the wargame so chemical weapons were forbidden as part of the simulation instead.

Some of Van Riper's complaints were valid, the US military was given a number of "experimental" technologies to simulate advancements they thought they might have in five years or so, which included stuff like effective combat lasers they don't even have now. He was also forbidden to use some strategies that I think where reasonable. However, a majority of it was him trying to basically use the equivalent of a wall glitch in an FPS tournament and then throwing a fit when the judges told him that wasn't allowed.

*Also it's not easy to find hundreds of suicide bombers all at once in a mass human wave attack the way Van Riper did, unless you're running a wargame and your volunteers are aware they aren't really going to die, that makes the logistics of mass kamikaze speedboats much easier.

 

[TheRomanSlayer]

Van Ryper's cheating tactics would have worked in a real combat, but in a simulation, it wouldn't be allowed. Even if it was applied in a real combat, there are certain constraints on how much suicide weapons they were allowed to have.

 

[LordsFire]

Van Ryper's cheating tactics would have worked in a real combat, but in a simulation, it wouldn't be allowed. Even if it was applied in a real combat, there are certain constraints on how much suicide weapons they were allowed to have.

It's really hard to believe things like suicide boats would work against the USN IRL. The standoff engagement range it's capable of is measured in the hundreds of miles; it'd be really hard to get suicide boats close enough to have a shot IRL.

 

[PsihoKekec]

Van Ryper's cheating tactics would have worked in a real combat, but in a simulation, it wouldn't be allowed.

No they wouldn't. For starters, messengers don't travel at the speed of radio messages, so you can't have instant messages via them. Combat forces don't start the engagement next to each other, so suicide boats have low chance of success, especially after the USS Cole bombing. You can't spread the the weight of ASM system over ten speedboats, it's not technically possible.

 

[Bear Ribs]

The US Navy also won't normally cram all their ships into a tiny operation wargame area in an actual war, you can't hit them all with kamikaze speedboats at the same moment because they'll be spread out over hundreds to thousands of square miles of ocean, much less getting propeller craft (year, he used a bunch of kamikaze civilian planes) through an Aircraft Carrier's defenses at range.

And note even with all that, they acknowledged Van Riper's first success. The response was basically "Yeah, good job wiping everybody out in a surprise attack. Now we paid a quarter billion dollars for a 14-day exercise so we're not quitting after day 1, the boats are 'refloated' and we're going to do more simulations and move on to the other stages of operation and presume the first part worked because otherwise we wasted all that money." That Van Riper griped about that part is pretty telling that he was just trying to say "I won."

 

[Iconoclast]

A bit of Van Riper's complaints were true but much of it was nonsense.

Wargames are constrained in area and time compared to real-life wars. You cannot shut down an entire nation nor extend the games for months, they have to take place in a small area for convenience's sake and have to take place in a limited amount of time for the same reason. Normally the people running the tests acknowledge this and don't minmax by taking advantage of those limitations to cheat.

Van Riper cheated. Things like sending all his communications via bike messengers and semaphore, that works fine in a constrained tiny environment for a wargame. Across a nation the size of Iraq or Iran coordinating complex multi-pronged maneuvers he was doing, from inside a bunker a hundred miles from the front lines? Ha ha, no, you don't remotely have the flexibility to do that with bike messengers carrying written orders. Similarly, he inflicted massive damage with explosive-equipped kamikaze speedboats which is a tactic an enemy nation might try, but those enemy nations wouldn't get to start a war with a huge swarm of pre-armed speedboats right next to the US Navy, that only worked because of the space constraints and him knowing when the exercise would begin*.

Van Riper complained that he was forbidden to use Chemical Weapons but as General William Kernan explained in his interview, they had 36 hours to conduct the ground operations part of the wargame and if chemical weapons were on the ground at the landing zone, the army would simply not land there and choose another landing zone, an enemy can't gas his entire nation after all, and outside of the wargame constraints they could wait out the chemicals, deploy countermeasures, or just land somewhere else. None of those options could be used due to time and space constraints on the wargame so chemical weapons were forbidden as part of the simulation instead.

Some of Van Riper's complaints were valid, the US military was given a number of "experimental" technologies to simulate advancements they thought they might have in five years or so, which included stuff like effective combat lasers they don't even have now. He was also forbidden to use some strategies that I think where reasonable. However, a majority of it was him trying to basically use the equivalent of a wall glitch in an FPS tournament and then throwing a fit when the judges told him that wasn't allowed.

*Also it's not easy to find hundreds of suicide bombers all at once in a mass human wave attack the way Van Riper did, unless you're running a wargame and your volunteers are aware they aren't really going to die, that makes the logistics of mass kamikaze speedboats much easier.

Van Riper was right. 20 years later, surface navies are absolutely obsolete. I've discussed this face-to-face with Navy guys and researchers, and they agreed. You can't do anything at all about the small boat threat.

How the U.S. Navy can defeat Iran’s swarm attacks? - Naval Post- Naval News and Information

When compared with the US, Iran has the limited military capability. Iran is trying to fill this gap with swarm attack tactics.

navalpost.com

If you can't do anything about the small boat threat, that has further implications that should be obvious to anyone who understands sensor fusion and swarm AI, as well as the prevalence of high-powered COTS electronics.

We are at the point right now where a violent non-state actor of sufficient sophistication could wipe out an entire carrier battle group. All they need is a narco-sub plant and a couple million dollars in materials, to build a couple hundred very cheap semi-submersible swarm torpedoes. These craft would consist of a fully enclosed and watertight sheet metal hull, a fuel tank and engine sufficient for several hundred kilometers of range, a snorkel for the engine, a mast for sensors, and a cheap ARM SOC with a GPS module, accelerometer, gyro, and various cameras on the sensor mast (RGB, IR, etc.).

It would be entirely unmanned and loaded with a thousand pounds of ANFO for a warhead. The controller would run a simple swarm AI algorithm so that all the craft in a swarm would know their relationship to the other craft, whether or not the other craft had engaged targets, how many of the other craft remained, how to maintain a spread-out formation, how to retarget if a target was already struck, et cetera. They would use GPS to navigate to the vicinity of a target, and, if GPS was jammed, they would fall back on inertial navigation and shape recognition using the mast cameras.

A typical engagement would go like this; ASW assets would detect a couple hundred incoming swarm torpedoes long before they reached the fleet, but only be able to take out, at maximum, a third of them before running out of ammo. Shortly after that, there would be panic as CIWS guns and deck-mounted Bushmasters struggle to aim at a bunch of snorkels sticking up out of the water in the dead of night. If even 10% of them make it through, all it takes is one hit at the waterline, and you're sleeping with the fishes.

With current technology, this thing could be built for under $10,000 apiece. Surface ships are obsolete. They're military relics, like horses.

 

[LordsFire]

With current technology, this thing could be built for under $10,000 apiece. Surface ships are obsolete. They're military relics, like horses.

Unstated assumptions in your scenario:

1: Such a fleet of torpedoes can be built without being noticed.
2: That such a fleet of torpedoes can be *deployed* without being noticed.
3: That jamming will not be able to prevent such a fleet from being remote controlled.
4: That the torpedoes are actually that cheap (hint, they won't be)
5: That they can get to the edge of a Carrier Battle Group's own detection range without being noticed.
6: That the officers in command of the fleet are just going to sit there drooling while their sonar lights up with hundreds of hostile contacts, rather than turning in the other way and going to flank speed, which would be faster than these primitive torpedoes can run.
7: That depth charges won't proximity soft-kill these primitive cheap-as-shit wonder-waffen.
8: That a single hit will be enough to kill a given USN ship.


That's just issues not addressed off the top of my head, come up with in about four minutes.

When you assume that your opposition are one hundred percent drooling incompetent morons, it's really easy to plot your way to a hypothetical victory.

"Sink enemy fleets with this one easy trick, the Navy Hates it!"

If it was that easy, the USN would already be on the bottom of the ocean.

 

[Husky_Khan]

I love these DCS Simulations. Boghammers, Drones and Styx Missile Swarms versus a Carrier Battle Group!

 

[Bear Ribs]

Van Riper was right. 20 years later, surface navies are absolutely obsolete. I've discussed this face-to-face with Navy guys and researchers, and they agreed. You can't do anything at all about the small boat threat.

How the U.S. Navy can defeat Iran’s swarm attacks? - Naval Post- Naval News and Information

When compared with the US, Iran has the limited military capability. Iran is trying to fill this gap with swarm attack tactics.

navalpost.com

If you can't do anything about the small boat threat, that has further implications that should be obvious to anyone who understands sensor fusion and swarm AI, as well as the prevalence of high-powered COTS electronics.

We are at the point right now where a violent non-state actor of sufficient sophistication could wipe out an entire carrier battle group. All they need is a narco-sub plant and a couple million dollars in materials, to build a couple hundred very cheap semi-submersible swarm torpedoes. These craft would consist of a fully enclosed and watertight sheet metal hull, a fuel tank and engine sufficient for several hundred kilometers of range, a snorkel for the engine, a mast for sensors, and a cheap ARM SOC with a GPS module, accelerometer, gyro, and various cameras on the sensor mast (RGB, IR, etc.).

It would be entirely unmanned and loaded with a thousand pounds of ANFO for a warhead. The controller would run a simple swarm AI algorithm so that all the craft in a swarm would know their relationship to the other craft, whether or not the other craft had engaged targets, how many of the other craft remained, how to maintain a spread-out formation, how to retarget if a target was already struck, et cetera. They would use GPS to navigate to the vicinity of a target, and, if GPS was jammed, they would fall back on inertial navigation and shape recognition using the mast cameras.

A typical engagement would go like this; ASW assets would detect a couple hundred incoming swarm torpedoes long before they reached the fleet, but only be able to take out, at maximum, a third of them before running out of ammo. Shortly after that, there would be panic as CIWS guns and deck-mounted Bushmasters struggle to aim at a bunch of snorkels sticking up out of the water in the dead of night. If even 10% of them make it through, all it takes is one hit at the waterline, and you're sleeping with the fishes.

With current technology, this thing could be built for under $10,000 apiece. Surface ships are obsolete. They're military relics, like horses.

BWAHAHA! Oh man that's a good one. Ten thousand each? Add three more zeroes and you might be able to get in the general vicinity. Please tell me your wank wasn't really the notion of "We'll make torpedoes, except way bigger, with way more range, and with way more advanced electronics, all for about 1/350th of what a real torpedo costs!"

The light subs the drug kingpins use to smuggle cocaine cost a cool 2 million each and don't have remotely the kind of advanced tech you're thinking of. Further, those submarines wouldn't even be able to catch a surface ship, those 2-million-dollar subs? They do less than ten knots. The only thing a carrier group would have to do to evade a swarm of those is go to, oh, about half speed.

A thousands pounds of ANFO able to sink a ship? Not likely, ANFO is a relatively low-power explosive (3200M/S detonation speed) compared to high explosives (about 9,000m/s detonation speed) and a convention mark 48 torpedo has about 650 pounds of high explosive, and it's still estimated to take several torpedoes to sink most ships. You're going to need about twenty times more ANFO or about two dozen of your submersibles to hit for this to work, better add another zero to your price tag to account for needing a massive mountain of explosives and a much, much bigger (and slower, can't forget that) submarine to lug it's stupidly large inefficient warhead around.

Oh yeah, and then after you throw your hundred million dollar subs at the target guided by periscopes? They're going to throw down some smoke and then suffer the worst damages of the engagement when some midshipman laughs so hard his soda comes up his nose watching your idiot AI drive around in circles because it can't see through it's periscope anymore.

 

[TheRomanSlayer]

Honestly, if I was placed in charge of Millennium Challenge 2002's Red team, I'd go for the disabling of their communications instead of the whole Game Shark-esque wipeout that Van Ryper had pulled. You could still have the motor boats, only you fill them with insurgents that can be armed with RPGs, and have them target the radar installations on the surface vessels, though the success rate may not be that high as well, as the surface ships have anti-personnel countermeasures.

Realistically? You'd probably need a combination of PT boats and submersibles to create a potent mosquito fleet to be able to engage in a naval equivalent of guerrilla warfare.

 

[Iconoclast]

Unstated assumptions in your scenario:

1: Such a fleet of torpedoes can be built without being noticed.

The factory is heavily camouflaged under jungle cover.

2: That such a fleet of torpedoes can be *deployed* without being noticed.

They're deployed by being rolled off modified fishing vessels and into the water from racks, like depth charges.

3: That jamming will not be able to prevent such a fleet from being remote controlled.

They would use GPS and fall back to inertial navigation and shape recognition when jammed.

4: That the torpedoes are actually that cheap (hint, they won't be)

The craft is about the size of a RHIB. It would consist of no more than $1000 in sheet metal, a cheap automotive Cummins turbo-diesel tuned to about 215 horsepower (it doesn't have to last forever at constant RPM like a true marine diesel), a few control servos, a Raspberry Pi with a GPS module running a custom barebones Linux build with nothing but the control software, some cameras off Alibaba, and $500 in ANFO.

The labor would be dirt-cheap because this would be in South America or some other shithole where welders get a few dollars an hour to slap things together. The biggest capital investment would be the coders and the testing, but I counted that separately from the unit cost (which was strictly materials and labor). If we included like $10 mil in R&D and software development, using existing software packages and combining them, then yes.

The point is, this is all well within the budget of a large VNSA profiting off drug sales. ISIS had assets worth $2 billion dollars at their height.

5: That they can get to the edge of a Carrier Battle Group's own detection range without being noticed.

They won't be able to do anything about it until it's too late, just like any other small boat swarm threat.

6: That the officers in command of the fleet are just going to sit there drooling while their sonar lights up with hundreds of hostile contacts,

Our navy rammed the USS Fitzgerald into a 29,000 GT container ship that they completely failed to notice with millions of dollars in cutting-edge radar equipment.

rather than turning in the other way and going to flank speed, which would be faster than these primitive torpedoes can run.

When closing with the target, the torpedoes would get up and plane and hit 60 knots.

7: That depth charges won't proximity soft-kill these primitive cheap-as-shit wonder-waffen.

Too small to hit with any accuracy. They know their position in relationship to all other drones and intentionally change course to attack a target from all directions, creating a 360-degree area that needs to be covered with weapons.

8: That a single hit will be enough to kill a given USN ship.

Unlikely, but there are probably ways to enhance the penetration of the warhead by experimenting with trial and error on an explosives range against metal targets of appropriate thickness until ideal geometry is reached.

That's just issues not addressed off the top of my head, come up with in about four minutes.

When you assume that your opposition are one hundred percent drooling incompetent morons, it's really easy to plot your way to a hypothetical victory.

"Sink enemy fleets with this one easy trick, the Navy Hates it!"

If it was that easy, the USN would already be on the bottom of the ocean.

The USAF know what's up.

https://media.defense.gov/2017/May/05/2001743004/-1/-1/0/OP_0070_GEIS_HAMMOND_FOSTER_HAILES_BLUE_HORIZONS_IV.PDF

The rapidly changing nature of technology suggests that the world and the associated technological challenges it faces are changing in unprecedented ways.7 It is not only the scope of technology change that is unprecedented but also its speed. This century will likely see 1,000 times the technological change of the last century, with each decade containing upwards of 70 times more technological development than occurred in the period from the dawn of time up until the year 2000.8 This combination of great scope and speed of technological change means that the world of the 2030s will not merely be an extension of today. In many respects it will be fundamentally different. As a result, the greatest threats the world may face likewise represent a significant departure from past thinking.

Disruptive technology is changing the whole landscape right before our eyes.

BWAHAHA! Oh man that's a good one. Ten thousand each? Add three more zeroes and you might be able to get in the general vicinity. Please tell me your wank wasn't really the notion of "We'll make torpedoes, except way bigger, with way more range, and with way more advanced electronics, all for about 1/350th of what a real torpedo costs!"

Unironically yes. This is the Kurt Saxon's Poor Man's James Bond torpedo.

The light subs the drug kingpins use to smuggle cocaine cost a cool 2 million each and don't have remotely the kind of advanced tech you're thinking of. Further, those submarines wouldn't even be able to catch a surface ship, those 2-million-dollar subs? They do less than ten knots. The only thing a carrier group would have to do to evade a swarm of those is go to, oh, about half speed.

This would be no larger than a Zodiac Hurricane RHIB, would be made from welded sheet metal, and would not require any amenities for crew or anything of that nature.

A thousands pounds of ANFO able to sink a ship? Not likely, ANFO is a relatively low-power explosive (3200M/S detonation speed) compared to high explosives (about 9,000m/s detonation speed) and a convention mark 48 torpedo has about 650 pounds of high explosive, and it's still estimated to take several torpedoes to sink most ships. You're going to need about twenty times more ANFO or about two dozen of your submersibles to hit for this to work, better add another zero to your price tag to account for needing a massive mountain of explosives and a much, much bigger (and slower, can't forget that) submarine to lug it's stupidly large inefficient warhead around.

This is true, it does have lower brisance than proper military HE. It could be upgraded to RDX or PETN, but the warhead alone would be about $22k in materials bare minimum, and likely quite a bit more than that.

Oh yeah, and then after you throw your hundred million dollar subs at the target guided by periscopes? They're going to throw down some smoke and then suffer the worst damages of the engagement when some midshipman laughs so hard his soda comes up his nose watching your idiot AI drive around in circles because it can't see through it's periscope anymore.

That's what the IR cameras are for. To see through obscuring smoke, etc.

 

[Sailor.X]

The US Navy also won't normally cram all their ships into a tiny operation wargame area in an actual war, you can't hit them all with kamikaze speedboats at the same moment because they'll be spread out over hundreds to thousands of square miles of ocean, much less getting propeller craft (year, he used a bunch of kamikaze civilian planes) through an Aircraft Carrier's defenses at range.

And note even with all that, they acknowledged Van Riper's first success. The response was basically "Yeah, good job wiping everybody out in a surprise attack. Now we paid a quarter billion dollars for a 14-day exercise so we're not quitting after day 1, the boats are 'refloated' and we're going to do more simulations and move on to the other stages of operation and presume the first part worked because otherwise we wasted all that money." That Van Riper griped about that part is pretty telling that he was just trying to say "I won."

Back in 1993 to early 1994 my ship was part of the USS Independence Battlegroup (not some wimpy Strike Group) in the Persian Gulf. We along with a few UK Royal Navy ships formed a ring around the carrier. We were about 2 miles from the carrier at all times when we were conducting operations. Tomcats and Hornets were providing cap cover and 2 Los Angeles Class subs were watching out for more hidden threats. Nothing got within eyesight range of the Battlegroup without us spotting it first. And we were steaming at speeds around 35knots. So we were moving water for real. The Iranians didn't even dare send any attack boats out. They didn't dare. They knew it would be suicidal for those they would send. So they stayed in their home waters and sent the US a sharply worded letter.

 

[LordsFire]

Unironically yes. This is the Kurt Saxon's Poor Man's James Bond torpedo.

We've done it gentlemen, we've discovered the Pierre Sprey of military naval engineering.

I'd like to see him build a prototype. He should be able to afford it, after all, given how cheap this new wonder-weapon that will 'win the war' is.

 

[Iconoclast]

We've done it gentlemen, we've discovered the Pierre Sprey of military naval engineering.

I'd like to see him build a prototype. He should be able to afford it, after all, given how cheap this new wonder-weapon that will 'win the war' is.

No, I'm definitely not building this. You'll have to settle for the next best thing. A 3D render I threw together in a couple minutes.







It is literally a redneck jetboat, sans cockpit, ballasted to sink such that the gooseneck snorkel, antenna, and sensor mast are the only parts that protrude above the surface when "hunting". That's all it is. Welded together from 12 or maybe 16 gauge mild steel, no paint, no bells and whistles, nothing. As cheap as can possibly be. It doesn't matter if it rusts, or if the engine would shit out after 200 hours of output. It doesn't live longer than a day from the moment it goes in the water, anyway. It's disposable.

Let's see what we can get off Alibaba for sensors.

Cheese-o Chinese rangefinder for golfers? Check. We can gut that.

This product is no longer available.

This product is no longer available.

www.alibaba.com

Ooo, look, an IR camera module.

This product is no longer available.

This product is no longer available.

www.alibaba.com

This shit is not as hard as people think it is.

EDIT: I should add, this is intentionally crude and simple. Basically, the Luty SMG of torpedoes.



Bruce Simpson infamously pissed off the New Zealand government when he stated his intentions to build a cruise missile for under $5000. This is a similar concept, just transplanted onto the water. All COTS components, everything cheap, everything Junkyard Wars-level crude. In fact, if you could source engines from an actual junkyard, that would be ideal.

The point I'm trying to make is this:

1. Modern COTS components are really, really good.
2. Terrorists are hilariously stupid and inept. How long have Hamas been launching oversized model rockets at Israel while the ability to strap a grenade to a quadrotor has been a thing for a decade?
3. The time to think about practical countermeasures against this tech was years and years ago.

 

[LordsFire]

No, I'm definitely not building this. You'll have to settle for the next best thing. A 3D render I threw together in a couple minutes.

You still have failed to answer the question:

If it's really this easy, then why hasn't anyone actually done it?

 

[Bear Ribs]

The factory is heavily camouflaged under jungle cover.

And apparently needs no raw materials, produces no pollution, and doesn't ship any goods since otherwise the cover means jack and analysts are going to notice roads carrying goods and clouds of smoke coming out of a suspicious patch of jungle cover.

They're deployed by being rolled off modified fishing vessels and into the water from racks, like depth charges.

And nobody will notice a Fishing boat with a swarm of gigantor torpedoes on the deck in racks trying to slip up to a carrier group, nope, totally stealthy. Also, how do you think your crude cobbled-together technology is going to handle being thrown off the deck of a fishing boat and slamming into the water with the force of a major car crash?

They would use GPS and fall back to inertial navigation and shape recognition when jammed.

The craft is about the size of a RHIB. It would consist of no more than $1000 in sheet metal, a cheap automotive Cummins turbo-diesel tuned to about 215 horsepower (it doesn't have to last forever at constant RPM like a true marine diesel), a few control servos, a Raspberry Pi with a GPS module running a custom barebones Linux build with nothing but the control software, some cameras off Alibaba, and $500 in ANFO.

The labor would be dirt-cheap because this would be in South America or some other shithole where welders get a few dollars an hour to slap things together. The biggest capital investment would be the coders and the testing, but I counted that separately from the unit cost (which was strictly materials and labor). If we included like $10 mil in R&D and software development, using existing software packages and combining them, then yes.

The point is, this is all well within the budget of a large VNSA profiting off drug sales. ISIS had assets worth $2 billion dollars at their height.

So, lets have some fun with your absurd (lack of )math here.

A Zodiac Hurricane is 22 feet long and 8-ish feet long. So we have the general size of your craft. That gives it a volume of around 550 cubic feet. Since it's going to be almost perfectly submerged, it needs to have the same weight as a similar volume of water, 35,000 pounds (I'm presuming a half of a cylinder to keep the math simpler).

People who understand the slightest bit of math are already figuring out why you're not going to be stacking a big swarm of these on the deck of a fishing boat.

Now, you can calculate the speed of a submarine using its horsepower and weight if you know its admiralty coefficient, but in this case we can do the reverse and look at our required admiralty coefficient (this is a measure of how streamlined it is) using the mass, your ridiculous engine, and a required speed of at least 40 knots to overtake ships that can do 35, though in reality only closing in at 5 knots is pretty slow and will give them tons of time to shoot your boats down. At flank speed, a great many navy ships will still outrun these drones. Your swarm really needs to be doing, like, 50 knots at least, but that's not possible with your engine. Actually, 40 knots is also not possible.

Using the Admiralty Constant to Estimate Submerged Speeds for Submarines

Whaddayaknow? Turns out you're going to need an admiralty coefficient of 1,810, and the most streamlined, most carefully built boat ever made only hit 650. But your boat's being made by poorly trained underpaid South American labor who are just "slapping it together" and you've emphasized how crude it is, so we can more reasonably assume you have an Admiralty Coefficient more in line with WW2 subs, around 50 is being generous, so perhaps 12 knots at flank speed, more likely 6-8 given the inefficiencies of using cobbled-together non-marine technology to try to build a boat. You can still hit a US Navy ship, it's just going to have to be a museum ship because even most age-of-sail craft and ships propelled by oars will outrun your drones.

Now as for your 1000 dollars in cheap-ass sheet metal, lets look at real costs.

https://www.mscdirect.com/browse/tnpla/32004558?cid=ppc-bing-New%20-%20Raw%20Materials%20-%20PLA&mkwid=gLKWdkMQ|dc&pcrid=73323731587545&gclsrc=3p.ds&?cid=ppc-bing-New%20-%20Raw%20Materials%20-%20PLA_gLKWdkMQ__be_73323731587545_c_&mkwid=gLKWdkMQ%7cdc&pcrid=73323731587545&product_id=32004558&utm_source=bing&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=New%20-%20Raw%20Materials%20-%20PLA&utm_term=4576923309574420&utm_content=Metals%20Ad%20Group%20-%20Supplier&gclsrc=3p.ds

A 4x8 sheet is 800 dollars all by itself, and those sheets are 0.06" thick so not remotely sufficient for our purposes, but lets assume the barely-above-foil thickness sheet works. Yoru boat is 22 feet long and 8 feet wide, I'm going to presume a box this time for convenience sake (You're going to have a bunch of waste anyway) so 592 square feet. The 4x8 sheet is obviously 32 square feet. Assuming miraculous zero-waste cutting, you need 18.5 sheets @ About 800 dollars each, or about 14,800 dollars in sheet metal alone. But since this is stupid thin sheet metal you're going to actually need something several times thinking, internal bulkheads and structural supports, etc. Again, a cheap-ass drug submarine costs 2 million and no, the seat is not the part driving up the costs.

Your notions of how much things costs are absurd.

They won't be able to do anything about it until it's too late, just like any other small boat swarm threat.

They've run games to test this out. The small boat swarms get slaughtered. This isn't surprising, "throw bodies at them until they run out of bullets" and head-on swarm waves were a discredited tactic all the way back in WW2.

When closing with the target, the torpedoes would get up and plane and hit 60 knots.

Too small to hit with any accuracy. They know their position in relationship to all other drones and intentionally change course to attack a target from all directions, creating a 360-degree area that needs to be covered with weapons.

Wait wait, now you're adding hydroplane abilities to the drones? You seriously believe you're building a boat that transforms from submarine to hydroplane using cheap-ass Campesino labor and low-budget parts you bought off Amazon for less than similarly-sized liferafts cost? Never mind that as soon as they pop up they're going to get shredded by incoming fire. Actually, the periscopes will get shredded anyway, CIWS are designed to handle incoming missiles doing multi-mach speeds, the periscopes moving at brisk walking speeds will be sitting ducks, much less the actual entire boat hydroplaning.

And of course, you don't have remotely the speed to encircle a target and surround it, you won't even have enough speed to catch up to it in the first place, and you certainly don't have enough horsepower to make your crude tubs hydroplane. Adding hydroplane gear is going to ruin your admiralty coefficient and make it even more hilariously slow while submerged, you're approaching "Woman pushing a stroller" speeds now.

Unlikely, but there are probably ways to enhance the penetration of the warhead by experimenting with trial and error on an explosives range against metal targets of appropriate thickness until ideal geometry is reached.

The USAF know what's up.

https://media.defense.gov/2017/May/05/2001743004/-1/-1/0/OP_0070_GEIS_HAMMOND_FOSTER_HAILES_BLUE_HORIZONS_IV.PDF

Disruptive technology is changing the whole landscape right before our eyes.



Unironically yes. This is the Kurt Saxon's Poor Man's James Bond torpedo.



This would be no larger than a Zodiac Hurricane RHIB, would be made from welded sheet metal, and would not require any amenities for crew or anything of that nature.

View attachment 1412

So it's no larger than a boat that goes for 70,000 dollars, but somehow costs 1/7th that price despite being submersible, self-guided, packing a massive warhead, able to transform into a hydroplane, and loaded down with advanced electronics and an AI pilot. Sounds legit.

Zodiac Hurricane for Sale Only $ 67,500 New - 2022

Zodiac Hurricane for Sale from the seller for buying a new Zodiac Boat. It has a fiberglass body and Evinrude 300 HP engine. Motors overhauled to zero hours in 2019, just 240 at the current time 29 JUN 2020, new electrical and water systems, tanks, boilers

www.luxuryatch.com

This is true, it does have lower brisance than proper military HE. It could be upgraded to RDX or PETN, but the warhead alone would be about $22k in materials bare minimum, and likely quite a bit more than that.

That's what the IR cameras are for. To see through obscuring smoke, etc.

Why am I not surprised you don't know they have smoke that blocks IR?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoke_screen#Infrared_smokes

It is literally a redneck jetboat, sans cockpit, ballasted to sink such that the gooseneck snorkel, antenna, and sensor mast are the only parts that protrude above the surface when "hunting". That's all it is. Welded together from 12 or maybe 16 gauge mild steel, no paint, no bells and whistles, nothing. As cheap as can possibly be. It doesn't matter if it rusts, or if the engine would shit out after 200 hours of output. It doesn't live longer than a day from the moment it goes in the water, anyway. It's disposable.

Let's see what we can get off Alibaba for sensors.

Cheese-o Chinese rangefinder for golfers? Check. We can gut that.

This product is no longer available.

This product is no longer available.

www.alibaba.com

Ooo, look, an IR camera module.

This product is no longer available.

This product is no longer available.

www.alibaba.com

This shit is not as hard as people think it is.

It's vastly harder than you think it is. "I can find this one part on Ali Baba that maybe would work but it's Chinese engineering so probably has a massive failure rate and then it's just a bare module so I'd need a massive amount of labor to make into anything and then have to figure out how to make it play with five dozen other modules, all of which have to be hardened enough to handle rough waters, combat, and being dropped off the side of a fishing boat" isn't the winning claim you think it is.

EDIT: I should add, this is intentionally crude and simple. Basically, the Luty SMG of torpedoes.



Bruce Simpson infamously pissed off the New Zealand government when he stated his intentions to build a cruise missile for under $5000. This is a similar concept, just transplanted onto the water. All COTS components, everything cheap, everything Junkyard Wars-level crude. In fact, if you could source engines from an actual junkyard, that would be ideal.

You mean the missile he claims that, no honest, he really built it but it's hidden in a safe place and nobody is allowed to see it? Do you also believe there's a Nigerian Prince who's going to transfer half the country's wealth into your bank account any day now since you helped him escape a revolution?

The point I'm trying to make is this:

1. Modern COTS components are really, really good.
2. Terrorists are hilariously stupid and inept. How long have Hamas been launching oversized model rockets at Israel while the ability to strap a grenade to a quadrotor has been a thing for a decade?
3. The time to think about practical countermeasures against this tech was years and years ago.

There points you're actually making are:

1. You severely underestimate how much everything costs while presuming a zero failure rate on techniques that produce a massive failure rate (Chinese-made sensors, untrained Campesino laborers welding together submarines out of cheap sheet metal with nothing budgeted for the structure, diesel engines not made for the water working in water, and all of these cheap components and crude welds continuing to function after the kind of massive shock being tossed off a fishing boat and falling a dozen feet into the water causes).

2. Terrorists know what they're doing better than you. Nobody straps a grenade to a quadrotor because quadrotors are hilariously slow by combat standards and sending grenade-equipped rotordrone swarms will just give the guys manning the fence a particularly easy game of skeet.

3. They have thought out practical countermeasures, years ago.

Navy's Littoral Combat Ship destroys swarming boat attack in test

A Navy Littoral Combat Ship destroyed an attacking swarm of small boats using a wide range of assets and weapons such as 57mm guns, radar, drones and helicopters, service officials said. <p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebe…

www.wearethemighty.com

Turns out small boat swarms are hilariously easy to destroy. Because they're so small, they aren't very seaworthy and even the wake of the capital ship was able to swamp them, and because small boats are inherently much less efficient at moving for their horsepower the littoral craft was able to outrun and outmaneuver them easily.

'Course the Navy was facing craft about ten times faster than yours so...

 

[Iconoclast]

And nobody will notice a Fishing boat with a swarm of gigantor torpedoes on the deck in racks trying to slip up to a carrier group, nope, totally stealthy. Also, how do you think your crude cobbled-together technology is going to handle being thrown off the deck of a fishing boat and slamming into the water with the force of a major car crash?

Ideally, there would be several such craft spread out over a large area, and the deployment system would be designed to let them down into the water smoothly. I suppose we could use ordinary davits for this, it would just take longer.

So, lets have some fun with your absurd (lack of )math here.

A Zodiac Hurricane is 22 feet long and 8-ish feet long. So we have the general size of your craft. That gives it a volume of around 550 cubic feet. Since it's going to be almost perfectly submerged, it needs to have the same weight as a similar volume of water, 35,000 pounds (I'm presuming a half of a cylinder to keep the math simpler).

People who understand the slightest bit of math are already figuring out why you're not going to be stacking a big swarm of these on the deck of a fishing boat.

That's a much, much larger volume than I imagined off the top of my head. I think the length was a bit of an overestimate. I was thinking of something with an internal volume of no more than about a hundred cubic feet or so. The empty mass would be approximately 3000 pounds. The empty volume would have to be used as a ballast tank, so clearly, we'd have to throw in like a 50gpm electric centrifugal pump, and they'd have to take on quite a bit of ballast as soon as they're in the water. About 400 to 500 gallons. The ballasted weight would be about 6000 to 8000 pounds. The warhead would occupy about 17 cubic feet, and the fuel tank would be no less than 100 gallons of diesel (or gasoline, if we used, like, a Toyota engine out of a junkyard).

Now, you can calculate the speed of a submarine using its horsepower and weight if you know its admiralty coefficient, but in this case we can do the reverse and look at our required admiralty coefficient (this is a measure of how streamlined it is) using the mass, your ridiculous engine, and a required speed of at least 40 knots to overtake ships that can do 35, though in reality only closing in at 5 knots is pretty slow and will give them tons of time to shoot your boats down. At flank speed, a great many navy ships will still outrun these drones. Your swarm really needs to be doing, like, 50 knots at least, but that's not possible with your engine. Actually, 40 knots is also not possible.

Using the Admiralty Constant to Estimate Submerged Speeds for Submarines

Whaddayaknow? Turns out you're going to need an admiralty coefficient of 1,810, and the most streamlined, most carefully built boat ever made only hit 650. But your boat's being made by poorly trained underpaid South American labor who are just "slapping it together" and you've emphasized how crude it is, so we can more reasonably assume you have an Admiralty Coefficient more in line with WW2 subs, around 50 is being generous, so perhaps 12 knots at flank speed, more likely 6-8 given the inefficiencies of using cobbled-together non-marine technology to try to build a boat. You can still hit a US Navy ship, it's just going to have to be a museum ship because even most age-of-sail craft and ships propelled by oars will outrun your drones.

That's close to my estimate off the top of my head, of about 8 to 10 knots submerged.

Now as for your 1000 dollars in cheap-ass sheet metal, lets look at real costs.

https://www.mscdirect.com/browse/tnpla/32004558?cid=ppc-bing-New%20-%20Raw%20Materials%20-%20PLA&mkwid=gLKWdkMQ|dc&pcrid=73323731587545&gclsrc=3p.ds&?cid=ppc-bing-New%20-%20Raw%20Materials%20-%20PLA_gLKWdkMQ__be_73323731587545_c_&mkwid=gLKWdkMQ%7cdc&pcrid=73323731587545&product_id=32004558&utm_source=bing&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=New%20-%20Raw%20Materials%20-%20PLA&utm_term=4576923309574420&utm_content=Metals%20Ad%20Group%20-%20Supplier&gclsrc=3p.ds

A 4x8 sheet is 800 dollars all by itself, and those sheets are 0.06" thick so not remotely sufficient for our purposes, but lets assume the barely-above-foil thickness sheet works. Yoru boat is 22 feet long and 8 feet wide, I'm going to presume a box this time for convenience sake (You're going to have a bunch of waste anyway) so 592 square feet. The 4x8 sheet is obviously 32 square feet. Assuming miraculous zero-waste cutting, you need 18.5 sheets @ About 800 dollars each, or about 14,800 dollars in sheet metal alone. But since this is stupid thin sheet metal you're going to actually need something several times thinking, internal bulkheads and structural supports, etc. Again, a cheap-ass drug submarine costs 2 million and no, the seat is not the part driving up the costs.

Your notions of how much things costs are absurd.

Is that really how much sheet metal costs, now? Jesus Christ. What ripoff artists. I remember when you could get a 4x8 sheet of steel for $300. What the fuck do they think they're selling? Gold?

They've run games to test this out. The small boat swarms get slaughtered. This isn't surprising, "throw bodies at them until they run out of bullets" and head-on swarm waves were a discredited tactic all the way back in WW2.

Didn't they do another wargame more recently that showed that the Iranian small boat threat was still a problem?

Wait wait, now you're adding hydroplane abilities to the drones? You seriously believe you're building a boat that transforms from submarine to hydroplane using cheap-ass Campesino labor and low-budget parts you bought off Amazon for less than similarly-sized liferafts cost? Never mind that as soon as they pop up they're going to get shredded by incoming fire. Actually, the periscopes will get shredded anyway, CIWS are designed to handle incoming missiles doing multi-mach speeds, the periscopes moving at brisk walking speeds will be sitting ducks, much less the actual entire boat hydroplaning.

And of course, you don't have remotely the speed to encircle a target and surround it, you won't even have enough speed to catch up to it in the first place, and you certainly don't have enough horsepower to make your crude tubs hydroplane. Adding hydroplane gear is going to ruin your admiralty coefficient and make it even more hilariously slow while submerged, you're approaching "Woman pushing a stroller" speeds now.

No, it doesn't have hydroplanes, it's a planing hull that submerges. Then, it pumps out the ballast over the course of several minutes and turns into an ordinary monohull speedboat.

Again, in this hypothetical engagement, there are hundreds of these things approaching a fleet. It is a quantity-over-quality approach. The assumption is that 90% of them will be destroyed while closing with their targets and the other 10% will hit their targets.

What I'm trying to describe here is an unmanned, low-cost, low-observable equivalent to a Shin'yō suicide boat.

So it's no larger than a boat that goes for 70,000 dollars, but somehow costs 1/7th that price despite being submersible, self-guided, packing a massive warhead, able to transform into a hydroplane, and loaded down with advanced electronics and an AI pilot. Sounds legit.

Zodiac Hurricane for Sale Only $ 67,500 New - 2022

Zodiac Hurricane for Sale from the seller for buying a new Zodiac Boat. It has a fiberglass body and Evinrude 300 HP engine. Motors overhauled to zero hours in 2019, just 240 at the current time 29 JUN 2020, new electrical and water systems, tanks, boilers

www.luxuryatch.com

$1000 to $2000 in sheet steel, $500 in electronics and optics, $500 warhead, $1200 engine out of a junkyard, $1200 electric ballast pump, $1000 gearbox and jet pump.

The figure I'm coming up with for materials is like $6000 to $8000, with an additional couple grand allowance for wasted materials and for labor. I can't see where the added cost is coming from.

Why am I not surprised you don't know they have smoke that blocks IR?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoke_screen#Infrared_smokes

I do know about IR smoke. I didn't know they used it on ships.

It's vastly harder than you think it is. "I can find this one part on Ali Baba that maybe would work but it's Chinese engineering so probably has a massive failure rate and then it's just a bare module so I'd need a massive amount of labor to make into anything and then have to figure out how to make it play with five dozen other modules, all of which have to be hardened enough to handle rough waters, combat, and being dropped off the side of a fishing boat" isn't the winning claim you think it is.

Some would presumably fail right out of the starting gate. Acceptable attrition.

You mean the missile he claims that, no honest, he really built it but it's hidden in a safe place and nobody is allowed to see it? Do you also believe there's a Nigerian Prince who's going to transfer half the country's wealth into your bank account any day now since you helped him escape a revolution?

There are guys who build valved and valveless pulsejets in their garages. I'm sure it would be a trivial matter to build a scaled-down buzzbomb with modern tech that could go at least 70 kilometers before running out of fuel. I mean, it's literally a model aircraft with a bomb in it.

There points you're actually making are:

1. You severely underestimate how much everything costs while presuming a zero failure rate on techniques that produce a massive failure rate (Chinese-made sensors, untrained Campesino laborers welding together submarines out of cheap sheet metal with nothing budgeted for the structure, diesel engines not made for the water working in water, and all of these cheap components and crude welds continuing to function after the kind of massive shock being tossed off a fishing boat and falling a dozen feet into the water causes).

Literally any engine can be used in a marine application. You can use an automotive engine in a speedboat or small semi-submersible, no problem. The only question is how long it's going to last in a constant RPM application. We aren't going for longevity, here. It doesn't have to have an MTBF of thousands of hours.

2. Terrorists know what they're doing better than you. Nobody straps a grenade to a quadrotor because quadrotors are hilariously slow by combat standards and sending grenade-equipped rotordrone swarms will just give the guys manning the fence a particularly easy game of skeet.

Lightweight racing quadrotors are hitting over 140 miles per hour, now.



If I had to take my chances trying to pop a hundred of 'em coming at me laden with high explosives and ball bearing shrapnel with a rifle or shotgun, I'd say fuck that. Ever see Slaughterbots?

3. They have thought out practical countermeasures, years ago.

Navy's Littoral Combat Ship destroys swarming boat attack in test

A Navy Littoral Combat Ship destroyed an attacking swarm of small boats using a wide range of assets and weapons such as 57mm guns, radar, drones and helicopters, service officials said. <p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebe…

www.wearethemighty.com

Turns out small boat swarms are hilariously easy to destroy. Because they're so small, they aren't very seaworthy and even the wake of the capital ship was able to swamp them, and because small boats are inherently much less efficient at moving for their horsepower the littoral craft was able to outrun and outmaneuver them easily.

'Course the Navy was facing craft about ten times faster than yours so...

They were attacked by a grand total of four small boats, and they have a 57mm Bofors with airbursting rounds. Of course they're going to defeat the threat.

 

[LordsFire]

Ideally, there would be several such craft spread out over a large area, and the deployment system would be designed to let them down into the water smoothly. I suppose we could use ordinary davits for this, it would just take longer.

As with your entire plan, you're showing extensive ignorance of how any of this works.

The Navy has eyes on every single civilian craft that gets within range to do something like launch a tactical anti-ship missile at them. They will know the ship's name, its class, and notice any odd things like massive racks of torpedos on the deck, especially when they start deploying them.

If you're using a ship big enough that these racks are not obvious, you're getting into the tens of millions of dollars price range, and probably tens of millions more for the concealed deployment mechanism. Also, sonar would immediately detect the torpedos once their engines are fired up anyways.

That's a much, much larger volume than I imagined off the top of my head. I think the length was a bit of an overestimate. I was thinking of something with an internal volume of no more than about a hundred cubic feet or so. The empty mass would be approximately 3000 pounds. The empty volume would have to be used as a ballast tank, so clearly, we'd have to throw in like a 50gpm electric centrifugal pump, and they'd have to take on quite a bit of ballast as soon as they're in the water. About 400 to 500 gallons. The ballasted weight would be about 6000 to 8000 pounds. The warhead would occupy about 17 cubic feet, and the fuel tank would be no less than 100 gallons of diesel (or gasoline, if we used, like, a Toyota engine out of a junkyard).

This entire exercise is just 'you were thinking' with no actual testing to see what the practical requirements would be.

That's close to my estimate off the top of my head, of about 8 to 10 knots submerged.

If they're moving that slowly submerged, they won't even be able to creep up on the fleet, because the fleet will be moving faster even just at standard low-intensity patrol speeds.

Is that really how much sheet metal costs, now? Jesus Christ. What ripoff artists. I remember when you could get a 4x8 sheet of steel for $300. What the fuck do they think they're selling? Gold?

It's almost like you didn't do your research.

Didn't they do another wargame more recently that showed that the Iranian small boat threat was still a problem?

If you make massive swarm attacks, it's a threat you have to treat seriously, instead of just lazily let them ram into you. That doesn't mean that they have a meaningful chance at actually taking you out when you are using appropriate tactics and weapons to deal with them.

No, it doesn't have hydroplanes, it's a planing hull that submerges. Then, it pumps out the ballast over the course of several minutes and turns into an ordinary monohull speedboat.

Again, in this hypothetical engagement, there are hundreds of these things approaching a fleet. It is a quantity-over-quality approach. The assumption is that 90% of them will be destroyed while closing with their targets and the other 10% will hit their targets.

What I'm trying to describe here is an unmanned, low-cost, low-observable equivalent to a Shin'yō suicide boat.

Boats which were only ever effective against forces conducting a land invasion of the place they were based out of. And of six thousand built, they managed to sink a few landing craft, and damage like three destroyers.

Not exactly effective knock-out weapons, and notably they were manned, and equipped with rockets.

$1000 to $2000 in sheet steel, $500 in electronics and optics, $500 warhead, $1200 engine out of a junkyard, $1200 electric ballast pump, $1000 gearbox and jet pump.

The figure I'm coming up with for materials is like $6000 to $8000, with an additional couple grand allowance for wasted materials and for labor. I can't see where the added cost is coming from.

You're not accounting for the labor cost at all, which unless you're going to set up an expensive factory with lots of automation equipment, is going to be hundreds of man-hours worth.

I do know about IR smoke. I didn't know they used it on ships.

...So you just assumed that they wouldn't use it in the Navy?

Why?

Some would presumably fail right out of the starting gate. Acceptable attrition.

This isn't a matter of 'some.' This is a matter of 'probably a thirty to fifty percent failure rate,' unless you're employing highly skilled labor in the assembly, which again drastically jacks your cost up.

There are guys who build valved and valveless pulsejets in their garages. I'm sure it would be a trivial matter to build a scaled-down buzzbomb with modern tech that could go at least 70 kilometers before running out of fuel. I mean, it's literally a model aircraft with a bomb in it.

Yes, there are people who are professional mechanics and/or engineers, who as personal passion projects, pour dozens to hundreds of hours and often thousands/tens of thousands of dollars into making such things. These are usually things they work on for years, building even more specialized skills on top of the specialized skills that they already possess.

And then, based on that, you're 'sure' (translation: you assumed) that it would be a trivial matter to build a much more sophisticated aircraft that uses one such engine as part of an integrated system that has a very low margin for error.

Literally any engine can be used in a marine application. You can use an automotive engine in a speedboat or small semi-submersible, no problem. The only question is how long it's going to last in a constant RPM application. We aren't going for longevity, here. It doesn't have to have an MTBF of thousands of hours.



Lightweight racing quadrotors are hitting over 140 miles per hour, now.



If I had to take my chances trying to pop a hundred of 'em coming at me laden with high explosives and ball bearings with a rifle or shotgun, I'd say fuck that. Ever see Slaughterbots?

The key factor about light-weight racing quad-rotors is that they're lightweight. The primary way that they achieve high speed and performance is by having such a low mass that it's easy to do so.

This notably means that they have little to no payload, short endurance, relatively short range, and would be utterly incapable of resisting E-war counters, on top of being incredibly fragile.



Your entire supposition is apparently a long chain of 'I think just far enough about this to find data points and reference points that support what I want to be true,' and going no further. Even the designers for the Mark 14 torpedo did a better job than this.

If you want a solid idea, you have to pursue disconfirmation, IE find out what problems, complications, and failure states exist for your theory, and then actively try to disprove it to see how it actually stands up. You have failed to do this.


And also, you still haven't answered the question: "If this is so easy, why hasn't anyone else done it yet?"

 

[Bear Ribs]

Ideally, there would be several such craft spread out over a large area, and the deployment system would be designed to let them down into the water smoothly. I suppose we could use ordinary davits for this, it would just take longer.

And your fishing boat carriers with their big obvious stacks of torpedoes on the deck aren't going to be hit by a missile or bomber at extreme range, well outside what these idiot drones can reach, because?

That's a much, much larger volume than I imagined off the top of my head. I think the length was a bit of an overestimate. I was thinking of something with an internal volume of no more than about a hundred cubic feet or so. The empty mass would be approximately 3000 pounds. The empty volume would have to be used as a ballast tank, so clearly, we'd have to throw in like a 50gpm electric centrifugal pump, and they'd have to take on quite a bit of ballast as soon as they're in the water. About 400 to 500 gallons. The ballasted weight would be about 6000 to 8000 pounds. The warhead would occupy about 17 cubic feet, and the fuel tank would be no less than 100 gallons of diesel (or gasoline, if we used, like, a Toyota engine out of a junkyard).

Okay, let's ignore that you apparently think there are so many identical working Cummins engines in good condition in junkyards you'll be able to outfit swarms of attack craft with them.

As usual, your estimates are absurd, more than absurd. A Mark 48 torpedo is 3600 pounds and 19 feet long, with 45 cubic feet of internal space. You're talking about building something lighter and only a bit larger than an existing torpedo, but with vastly longer ranges, a bigger (albeit stupidly inefficient and incapable) warhead, and far more advanced sensor abilities despite being built by cut-rate Campinos for 1/350th the cost of the Mark 48. Do you understand how ridiculous you're getting?

Your size to weight ratio is all screwed up so your ship won't be able to submerge in the first place. A hundred cubic feet of water weighs 6,242.80 pounds. You're approaching Weberfoam densities here. No, a 500 gallon ballast tank won't help, that's 66 cubic feet all by itself for just the water, a lot more for the tank and pumps, leaving perhaps at most 30 cubic feet for your warhead, engine, and electronics. EDIT: For fun, I looked up the engine specs and figure it needs around 45-50 cubic feet for that. So accepting your 17 cubic foot measure for ANFO, that leaves you at -29 Cubic feet left for your electronics, valves, water jet, and structural members.

That's close to my estimate off the top of my head, of about 8 to 10 knots submerged.

Okay, and the only time navy ships aren't going to be doing way more than that is when they're at anchor... even at lazy patrol speed they're going to be twice as fast and they can do four or five times your max speed at flank. How do you expect to even catch them, much less do your encircling maneuver to surround the ships?

Is that really how much sheet metal costs, now? Jesus Christ. What ripoff artists. I remember when you could get a 4x8 sheet of steel for $300. What the fuck do they think they're selling? Gold?

My dude, the engine you specified alone costs 9,995 dollars, and that's the cheapest I could find. That leaves 5 dollars for the hull, fuel and ballast tanks, explosives, all your advanced electronics, and the labor to assemble it. You truly haven't a clue what things cost.

https://surplusrecord.com/listing/cummins-6bta5-9-engine-assembly-215-hp-remanufactured-2019-9995-00-3-available-238376/

Didn't they do another wargame more recently that showed that the Iranian small boat threat was still a problem?

They concluded that in theory, the Iranian small boats could be a threat to troop landers or the like as they approached shore, not to any real naval group. That presumed the small boats were equipped with their own rockets and other weapons you don't have, not that Iranian boats were doing a measly 10 knots and could only do damage by ramming.

No, it doesn't have hydroplanes, it's a planing hull that submerges. Then, it pumps out the ballast over the course of several minutes and turns into an ordinary monohull speedboat.

Again, in this hypothetical engagement, there are hundreds of these things approaching a fleet. It is a quantity-over-quality approach. The assumption is that 90% of them will be destroyed while closing with their targets and the other 10% will hit their targets.

What I'm trying to describe here is an unmanned, low-cost, low-observable equivalent to a Shin'yō suicide boat.

What you're trying to describe follows the laws of physics... and economics, less than a typical BattleTech design. I've never seen such FASAnomics proposed in real life before, my ghast is well and truly flabbered.

$1000 to $2000 in sheet steel, $500 in electronics and optics, $500 warhead, $1200 engine out of a junkyard, $1200 electric ballast pump, $1000 gearbox and jet pump.

The figure I'm coming up with for materials is like $6000 to $8000, with an additional couple grand allowance for wasted materials and for labor. I can't see where the added cost is coming from.

The figure you're coming up with wouldn't be enough to build a wood and papier-mache replica of your proposed attack boat, much less the real thing.

Some would presumably fail right out of the starting gate. Acceptable attrition.

Try 100%. FFS, you're trying to mount a 215HP diesel engine onto thin sheet metal (you allocated zero dollars for structural members) and expecting it to not rip itself apart instantly. You don't even have any budget for bolts and rivets to hold things together.

There are guys who build valved and valveless pulsejets in their garages. I'm sure it would be a trivial matter to build a scaled-down buzzbomb with modern tech that could go at least 70 kilometers before running out of fuel. I mean, it's literally a model aircraft with a bomb in it.

Those guys aren't Campinos in South America working for 5 bucks an hour. Call up your dudes, ask them for a price estimate for your suicide boats and see what they say.

Literally any engine can be used in a marine application. You can use an automotive engine in a speedboat or small semi-submersible, no problem. The only question is how long it's going to last in a constant RPM application. We aren't going for longevity, here. It doesn't have to have an MTBF of thousands of hours.

Yes it does, either your drones actually have that kind of longevity or your fishing boat haulers have to get so close to the carrier group they will be sunk before your failpedoes are ready to deploy.

Lightweight racing quadrotors are hitting over 140 miles per hour, now.



If I had to take my chances trying to pop a hundred of 'em coming at me laden with high explosives and ball bearings with a rifle or shotgun, I'd say fuck that. Ever see Slaughterbots?

Yes, Slaughterbots was nonsense that ignored the extremely large number of easy countermeasures available and all the numbers and facts on the ground in favor of a horror movie pretending to be realism. FFS, the killer 'bots in it could be completely defeated by closing the window. I'm not surprised such ridiculousness is inspiring you.

As usual, the numbers aren't on your side. Your racing quadrotor is carrying no payload which would dramatically slow it. It was also likely in the range of around 10,000 dollars all by itself (Cue you explaining that it's mostly a few ounces of plastic and you found a cheap electric motor on Ali-Baba for 1.99 so a racing drone should be under five bucks because you don't understand how manufacturing or economics work).

The Terrorists meanwhile have a much better strategy than you. A Qassam rocket costs in the range of 300-800 dollars, its velocity is 5-10 times higher than even the racing drone, and the Israelis still shoot down 90% of them. For the price of your 100 grenade quadrotors they could fire around 1500 Qassams and land perhaps 150 hits. That's your actual quantity-over-quality weapon, at a 90% failure rate they would still land more hits than your entire drone fleet has members. With your quadrotors you're going to be spending around a million dollars on trying to send 100 of them at a target that can handle projectiles vastly faster, again it's going to be a lazy skeet shoot and then you're down a million bucks for no appreciable results.