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Narco Submarine Found in Spain
- rhokstar 6y agoI briefly thought that the Narco sub was of Latin America origins and made its way to Europe. That would've been a wild story!
- solarexplorer 6y agoThis did happen a year ago https://elpais.com/politica/2019/12/13/actualidad/1576232797_250425.html https://elpais.com/politica/2019/12/13/actualidad/1576232797...
- suifbwish 6y agoWhy does it look like that site was built just for that one article?
- soneil 6y agoBecause it's actually 99% content? It's a slightly jarring look when you're used to "I know you're trying to read this, but here's 10 more articles that look better on our engagement rates than simply scrolling". It's a major newspaper in Spain. First or second in the country depending on whether you're counting by online or print readership. It doesn't exist just for one article. (Although with a little clicking around, it does appear most articles have a sidebar, and this one doesn't. No idea there.)
- vlz 6y agoThis article from the same site has pictures and also a cutaway of a transatlantic sub. http://www.hisutton.com/Narco%20Subs%20101.html http://www.hisutton.com/Narco%20Subs%20101.html
- JumpCrisscross 6y agoThis is the second subterfuge tech article on the front page. Is this kit being found because of the pandemic? Lower demand causing more time on the surface and in docks where it can be found?
- monocasa 6y agoThe Armored Stealth Boat was apparently found in 2003. It's the same site in both cases; I imagine someone dug in more and found another link for HN.
- kelvinquee 6y agoMirror - http://archive.today/osgar http://archive.today/osgar
- f430 6y agowonder why these narco subs are never found heading to East Asia, are the waters more treacherous in the Pacific?
- boomboomsubban 6y agoWhere would they travel to and from where there isn't already an easier land route? Japan and maybe South Korea I guess, but both of their sea borders are also fairly contentious. There isn't really an equivalent Morocco to Spain in distance and profitability.
- ceejayoz 6y agoYou really don't want to travel thousands of miles in open ocean in one of these things.
- alliao 6y agothe narcotics are FROM there, so doesn't make much sense to reverse paddle...
- 3131s 6y agoNot the cocaine as far as I know, but meth, heroin, and some others are produced here. Cocaine is about 150-180$ a gram in Southeast Asia, whereas most other drugs are dirt cheap.
- 6y ago
- midasuni 6y agoOoh an XKCD password
- chordalkeyboard 6y agoI don’t get it.
- zyl1n 6y agohttps://xkcd.com/936/ https://xkcd.com/936/
- chordalkeyboard 6y agoHow is this related to the article I just read?
- zyl1n 6y agoOP probably means the title "Narco Submarine Found in Spain" sounds like a password from the comic.
- chordalkeyboard 6y agoThanks, I laughed once you explained it. May the acausal robot gods bless hacker news :)
- midasuni 6y agoThe original hyphens too - I often use hyphens and capitalisations to get round “you must include symbols in this password” issues
- pvaldes 6y agoThe article don't mention that is the first known narcosub that was being build directly in Europe. Is a further step in this arms race.
- mastazi 6y agoArchive link in case original page is not loading for you: https://web.archive.org/web/20210314215410/http://www.hisutton.com/Narco-Submarine-Found-In-Spain.html https://web.archive.org/web/20210314215410/http://www.hisutt... (This website currently has 2 articles on the HN home page and is being hit hard)
- seany 6y agoThis is awesome.
- csense 6y agoMilitary subs have a lot high-tech stealth tech (much of it classified) to hide their electronic signals, engine noise, and so on. How do these vessels routinely get through, and they have very little stealth tech? If the Spanish / NATO / US military ignores them or can't see them, doesn't that mean actual (enemy) Chinese / Iranian / Russian subs can get away with a lot by pretending to be simple drug smuggling boats? Maybe the military lets drug smugglers operate, and even ignores foreign governments doing submarine subterfuge like bugging undersea cables or dropping spies / equipment onto shores at night? The purpose of turning a blind eye to be protecting information about anti-sub capabilities, if the drug kingpins or enemy spymasters don't know which of their missions successfully maintained secrecy? Maybe when the anti-sub network alerts successfully, they watch the spies and equipment that lands from a distance with high-tech drones / satellites (or heck, a simple patrol squad with night vision binoculars), follow them for a few months, then tip off the cops (if it's a mere drug cartel) or send counterintelligence to arrest them (in case of actual spies). So the enemy has to guess whether they got seen on the submarine landing, or were compromised by some other means. That these boats can get through might be a catastrophic failure of anti-sub tech, or it might be part of the normal I-know-you-know game of international espionage. I suppose we civilians wouldn't be able to tell the difference. Perhaps the biggest clue is that drug subs have been a thing for many years, but there's a notable lack of public alarm from military / politicians over it. Given that, I'd put my money on the hypothesis that the military knows exactly what the smugglers are up to, but chooses to ignore it to keep anti-sub capabilities and weaknesses secret.
- sudosysgen 6y agoSubmarines are inherently quite stealthy. Military submarines need all that tech to be able to hide from active surveillance - I assume no one is staging ASW operations against Narco submarines. And yes, Chinese/Russian subs can get away with a ton as long as they don't get detected.
- csense 6y ago> I assume no one is staging ASW operations against Narco submarines. Subs on covert missions don't exactly fly flags. I find it hard to believe there's anti-sub tech that can tell if a given vessel is being operated by cartel members or the Russian navy. Well, yes, if it's a high-tech vessel then it's obviously some nation-state. But if you know your enemy always goes after high-tech subs and ignores low-tech subs, Russia can simply build a fleet of low-tech subs and use them, knowing the NATO commander on duty will take a glance at the sonar readout and say "Ahh it's those drug smugglers again, law enforcement's business, not our problem, we do nothing, boys." Point is, they should be doing ASW operations against the Narcos, if they can't tell without boarding the sub whether it's the Narcos or the Russians. While it's probably impossible for the Narcos to build a Russian-looking sub, I'm sure it'd be pretty easy for the Russians to build a Narco-looking sub. And the Russians have quite an incentive to do so if, as you assert, "nobody's staging ASW operations against Narco submarines."
- fattypouch 6y agoi wish the site would load faster. this is wildly fascinating.
- willvarfar 6y ago(Webjanitor) sorry the site is slow to load, I’m actually amazed it’s holding up at all considering how it’s really not dimensioned to! It is a one core vm with no ram and Mb throttle: it’s normally doing a few dozen visitors a minute, kinda thing. There’s loads more super interesting tech posts on this blog, so do bookmark and visit later when it’s quieter :)
- chordalkeyboard 6y agoHis book is also worth a purchase.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- tedd4u 6y agoL
- supernova87a 6y agoWell, to be accurate, these vessels are usually not fully submersible / true submarines. That would require a level of engineering and cost that is probably not worth it for smugglers. These are semi-submersed "snorkeling" vessels that breath surface air and ride just under the water, which makes it much simpler to design/build + operate. The real goal is to get most of the ship off the surface where it can be easily detected. Semi-submersible is good enough for that purpose. I'm guessing various countries' navies (underwater sound detection) probably can detect these vessels with some accuracy if they wanted to, they just don't have the resources/time to go after them as their top priority.
- colourgarden 6y agoThis is explained in paragraph four of the article.
- freddie_mercury 6y agoEvery post has comments that haven't read the article and then go on to give an explanation that they assume the article lacks. It somehow feels like the HN equivalent of mansplaining.
- unwind 6y agoI agree, it's a bit annoying. But, in my opinion, in this particular instance it could be seen as a meta comment that the submission title is wrong. It says "submarine", but the vessel in question is not in fact a submarine and that is also annoying. The title is supposedly written by someone who has read the article they're submitting, after all.
- 542354234235 6y ago> I'm guessing various countries' navies (underwater sound detection) probably can detect these vessels with some accuracy if they wanted to, they just don't have the resources/time to go after them as their top priority. The ocean is huge and actual nation state subs are incredibly stealthy. It is far more feasible to just pay super close attention to all known subs and follow them out of known ports, focusing your tech on tracking them. Those narco "subs" just rely on how big the ocean is to avoid some patrol just happening to see them.
- slimsag 6y agoThe exhaust pipes on this don't look very lengthy, maybe 3 feet max - I imagine this would introduce some challenges keeping the engine running, or require some fairly precise depth control to avoid water getting in the exhaust?
- marktolson 6y agoI'm no boat designer but this seems like such an inefficient hull design. This is supposed to ride low which makes it a displacement hull but the transom / stern would create a huge low pressure area behind the boat hence a very high drag coefficient. Is there something I am missing here?
- fsckboy 6y agoi'm no boat designer either, but I think what they've done is taken a normal boat and converted it, reducing the number of problems they need to solve?
- marktolson 6y agoWhich I get, but why not choose a displacement hull that's designed to ride through the water as opposed to the over it? Even fewer problems to solve. They could use a smaller, quieter engine with no stern drive I/O leg needed (more reliable, less moving parts etc). My only theory is that these boats may be designed to plane (once the ballast has been dumped) to get away from threats at higher speeds.
- chordalkeyboard 6y agoThe people making these are “boat designers” but they are not maritime nautical engineers. They are also working clandestinely and optimizing for cargo capacity and stealth, and likely working as fast as they can.
- 542354234235 6y agoAnd most maritime nautical engineers could make good money doing legit work. So the labor pool to go out to a random jungle to risk your life, worry about being executed, worry about being arrested by law enforcement, and figuring out how to launder whatever money you make is probably pretty small.
- mrleiter 6y ago
- tomcooks 6y agoSuch vessels with visible rear engines are being phased out by narcotrafficants because it's easy for the police to stop them through shooting
- 542354234235 6y agoSource?
- londons_explore 6y agoThe logical next step for these submarines is to go autonomous, and be minuaritized. Small 6 feet long submarines which just head to a predetermined gps coordinate and travel at 1 mph, powered by a solar panel floating a few inches under the water surface would be very hard to detect without very specialist tech. They could probably be built for $1000 each without any custom built parts - simple RC plane servos, a compass and GPS, and an arduino should suffice. The smugglers could then head out at their leisure and pick them out of the water after their 2/3 month transit time.
- m4rtink 6y agoI would assume the ocean would just shredd something so flimsy to pieces even with normal wave action, let alone a major storm. If you want something to survive 2-3 months in the ocean it needs to be quite sturdy.
- arethuza 6y agoNot to mention the collision risk of something lurking just under the surface with no lights or a radar reflector.
- neuronic 6y agoYea because that's what drug cartels care about. Package loss is part of the process.
- cpach 6y agoOTOH the drug cartels probably have lots of money to invest. So if they need something sturdy they could probably hire a team to build that.
- sgt 6y agoIt's hard enough sometimes for normal companies to find the right resources. How many engineers are willing to work for cartels? Either they can do that by means of threat or fear, or finding the least ethically minded engineers that are looking for lots of money. I bet both cases are difficult to manage.
- Yaggo 6y agohttp://www.hisutton.com/The%20Escape%20of%20Bernd%20Boettger.html http://www.hisutton.com/The%20Escape%20of%20Bernd%20Boettger... This link from the article's footer was even more interesting – an escape from East germany using self-made "scuba scooter".
- varispeed 6y agoThis submarine looks quite amateur. People forget that today's organisations thanks to demand and tax free profits have multi-billion budgets for those kind of operations, even exceeding some of the national armies. I am pretty sure they already have stealth high tech submarines that are going back and forth undetected.