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DARPA Completes Underminer Program: New tactical tunneling technologies
- swader999 5y agoThere's some rabbit holes to go down with this one.
- sassy_quat 5y agoFirst there's AirLand Battle, then there's AirLandSea Battle, now there is AirLandSeaSpaceUnderground Battle? I'm not certain about how military strategy is improving with technology.
- Animats 5y agoDARPA has a fascination with underground operations. There was a DARPA Subterranean Robot Challenge.[1] [1] https://youtu.be/6-S1ni5aFAw https://youtu.be/6-S1ni5aFAw
- samstave 5y agoDont forget the patents for nuclear powered TBMs to bore and melt the rock as it went... There are several other patents on these from the 60s as well: https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/qlfc6r/til_in_1972_the_los_alamos_national_laboratories/ https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/qlfc6r/til_i...
- Animats 5y agoThat's in Disney's "The Magic Highway" (1958), at 02:16. Which is apparently still shown at Disney parks in the waiting area for some auto-related attraction.
- Helloyello 5y ago
- saltcured 5y agoPerhaps someone will backronym NEUTRINOs to replace SEALs for their ability to go just about anywhere...
- Terry_Roll 5y agoAnd there is something notoriously absent from the webpage, the fact it might be possible to tunnel underneath some headquarters and leave some explosives directly underneath to blow the enemy up, pun intended.
- wolverine876 5y agoAsymmetric combatants, including in Vietnam and Gaza, have long used tunnels. I think they were popular in medieval siege warfare (is that right?). I wonder why advanced militaries don't appear to use them: They have access to technology far superior to asymmetric groups and I would guess that allows much faster tunneling. Maybe it's almost always better ROI to do the same thing via the air - e.g., distribute supplies via airdrop.
- ch4s3 5y agoTunneling to undermine walls probably began in the Bronze Age and it was used to breach trenches in WWI. It has apparently alway been awful work. I’ve read that some premodern walled cities sunk metal bars in pits below walls to try and find where enemies were digging.
- greggsy 5y agoThat might make moats more useful
- leereeves 5y ago> I think they were popular in medieval siege warfare (is that right?). Yeah, in fact the term "undermine" comes from their use in siege warfare. Attackers would try to dig under enemy walls to collapse them (literally under-mining the walls), and the defenders would dig their own tunnels to try to collapse the attackers' tunnels.
- jonplackett 5y agoWouldn’t want to be the one digging those tunnels. Bad enough digging tunnels when you don’t intend them to collapse.
- a9h74j 5y agoA First-Person Tunneler would probably also make for a boring video game. Wait, does the word 'boring' come from the drugdery of digging tunnels?
- zkms 5y agoThis is really interesting; is there somewhere with more detail on the work completed under this program?
- webmaven 5y agoI'm pretty sure this is an April Fools'.
- jpollock 5y agoThen they suckered GE spectacularly: "May 29, 2020" https://www.ge.com/news/reports/dig-this-ge-engineers-learned-from-worms-how-to-build-underminer-a-tunneling-robot-funded-by-darpa https://www.ge.com/news/reports/dig-this-ge-engineers-learne...
- DavidPeiffer 5y agoAnd just to make sure I wasn't getting suckered by two groups collaborating, it's also on archive.org from that timeframe. https://web.archive.org/web/20200808234935/https://www.ge.com/news/reports/dig-this-ge-engineers-learned-from-worms-how-to-build-underminer-a-tunneling-robot-funded-by-darpa https://web.archive.org/web/20200808234935/https://www.ge.co...
- csee 5y agoThat's disappointing, isn't this a legitimately good idea? Judging from the current Russian invasion into Ukraine, a tunnel into Mariupol to deliver supplies would have been useful, not to mention the defensive usefulness of underground bunkers throughout Ukraine which have shielded civilians.
- akyu 5y agoIt's not an April Fools.
- hirundo 5y agoApril fools comedy is an unethical use of taxpayer dollars. If you're going to seize the fruits of our labor please don't spend it on chuckles.
- idiotsecant 5y agoI think my eyes might roll straight out of my head.
- gclawes 5y agoBehold, the Underminer!
- jmpman 5y agoExpect that undetectable improvise explosives would make Ukraine much less conquerable. A big enough pipe to pump in a bunch of ANFO under a road should be sufficient to take out a tank.
- simne 5y agoWith unlimited budget there will be underground missiles, underground snipers, underground planes and helicopters ;)
- bufferoverflow 5y agoI think an underground airbase is much cheaper than a destroyed airbase. The situation in Ukraine showed how unprotected airplanes sitting on the ground are.
- sudosysgen 5y agoUnderground airbases can still be destroyed. You just have to attack the entry and exit points. There are also specific munitions you could use. You could even fly a cruise missile through whichever entry is used for planes to leave.
- FredPret 5y agoThat’s harder though
- sudosysgen 5y agoSure, but once they're destroyed, you're irretrievably fucked and so is everything that was inside. You can endure a fair level of damage on a regular airbase.
- simne 5y agoHave you hear about works on underground systems of tunnels for icbm? They are extremely expensive, but large networks seem nearly impossible to destroy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_Great_Wall_of_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_Great_Wall_of_Chin...
- sudosysgen 5y agoSure, but ICBMs aren't airplanes.
- hhs 5y agoIf interested, this provides more context on the Pentagon project: https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/weapons/a32700671/tactical-tunnel-earthworm-robot/ https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/weapons/a32700671/...
- agumonkey 5y agoI kept wondering if Musk microtunnel thing could have been miniaturized to such purposes.
- freemint 5y agoMusk just bought a normal tunnel boring machine for the boring company. No proprietary tunneling hardware so far.
- TaylorAlexander 5y agoThis article claims they have designed their own machine. “unlike traditional tunnel boring machines (TBM), Prufrock is custom designed by The Boring Company, and it is expected to be capable of digging far quicker than its conventional counterparts.” https://www.teslarati.com/elon-musk-boring-company-prufrock-deployed/ https://www.teslarati.com/elon-musk-boring-company-prufrock-...
- thedrbrian 5y agoDigging around the net there’s not much on the prufrock. Loads of “tech news” sites repeating tweets or PR puff pieces but no concrete info on what prufrock is doing. Even their website is scarce of info.
- taf2 5y agoWait isn’t this the villain at the end of the incredibles? https://pixar.fandom.com/wiki/The_Underminer https://pixar.fandom.com/wiki/The_Underminer
- postingposts 5y agoIf you ever work with people from DARPA you’ll find that they have great capabilities in both secrecy and humor. A lot of 4chan types end up there.
- zeckalpha 5y ago4chan, best known for its ability to keep secrets and the quality of its humor?
- postingposts 5y agoGenerally if someone is well-known for keeping secrets then they are doing something incorrectly. It’s not the website that is employed but rather users of the website, and they also use gasp other websites and do awfully mundane things as well. When you open your mind you’ll find the kind you believed was ill-defined simply was the spider viewed from the fly.
- marcellus23 5y ago4chan has been the source for a huge amount of internet memes.
- zeckalpha 5y agoI recently saw a new meme that was posted on Reddit, and then a day later posted to 4chan as if it was new. They may be brokers rather than originators.
- kfarr 5y agoYes and who makes a fantastical return at the start of incredibles 2! Also voiced by the guy is the only actor to be featured in every Pixar movie.
- RodgerTheGreat 5y agoPerhaps we will yet see the real-world deployment of the nuclear subterrene: https://projectcamelot.org/la5354ms.pdf https://projectcamelot.org/la5354ms.pdf (Assuming, of course, that three-letter agencies haven't already been using this technology to honeycomb the country with networks of secret tunnels for decades...)
- sitkack 5y agoI am glad we are getting this capability now, who knows when ISIS and the Taliban will have enriched uranium to the point where they have subsurface ships prowling the depths of our planet, attacking our freedoms from below.
- thisisauserid 5y agoWe cannot allow a mineshaft gap.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- VectorLock 5y agoThis would make good origin story for the new Backrooms fiction thats developing.
- germinalphrase 5y agoLink?
- GauntletWizard 5y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4dGpz6cnHo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4dGpz6cnHo is the "original"[1] video, though many SCP games had similar environments and settings beforehand. See various memes spawned from it, such as https://www.reddit.com/r/tf2/comments/tb0v29/the_backrooms/ https://www.reddit.com/r/tf2/comments/tb0v29/the_backrooms/ and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72Y0LHM1vGs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72Y0LHM1vGs [1] Responsible for the most recent set of trends, but derivative of creepypasta that's been gathering traction for a while. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/the-backrooms https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/the-backrooms - points to 2018, but I'm pretty sure that SCP wiki had versions before then.
- ichugwindex 5y agoImagine if drug cartels had their hands on this technology. Whack a mole on a whole new level.
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- Proven 5y ago
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- idontwantthis 5y agoI did read a while ago that a war on on mainland china would be expected to be fought largely underground. This is due to unstoppable, cheap drones and loitering munitions on both sides basically making the surface unusable for combat.
- mleonhard 5y agoCan you share a link to information about this?
- idontwantthis 5y agoThis doesn't specifically mention China, but it is about the shift to underground fighting techniques https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-army/2019/02/26/the-subterranean-battlefield-warfare-is-going-underground-into-dark-tight-spaces/ https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-army/2019/02/26/the-...
- lambdadmitry 5y agoThe exaggeration is great in this one. Drones are hardly "unstoppable" for an advanced military like the one US has. Cheap ones require radio links and can be jammed. More expensive ones communicating via satellites aren't cheap. Autonomous are either pipe dream or basically bad cruise missiles. That's not even considering advances in radar (utilising microdoppler effects), IR (drones are hot), and various effectors (lasers and cheap auto cannons).
- krisoft 5y ago> Autonomous are either pipe dream or basically bad cruise missiles. Loitering munitions are already capable for much more than a “bad cruise missile”. I wouldn’t dismiss autonomous drones that easily. The trick is that they don’t have to be perfect, just probabilistically good enough for them to be worth their cost.
- lambdadmitry 5y ago
- aaron695 5y ago
- systemvoltage 5y agoWhat are the ways to counter this? If it is a large drilling machine, I suspect you could use seismic detectors?
- dirtyid 5y agohttps://www.darpa.mil/program/underminer https://www.darpa.mil/program/underminer Concept art suggest tunnels networks a few inches wide, not for moving bodies but for resupply in urban environments. Looks like horizontal directional drilling rigs for wells, which takes weeks.
- bluenose69 5y agoTunnelling during WWI is described evocatively in Sebastian Faulk's novel "Birdsong". Evidently this generated a TV programme (https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2012/jan/22/birdsong-tunnel-warfare-sebastian-faulks); https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2012/jan/22/birdson... although I've not seen that, I can report that the novel is heart-stunning.
- Invictus0 5y agoI worked on a similar top secret rapid tunnel project at Raytheon (I did not have a clearance and did not learn any classified info). The tunnel boring was miserably slow and it was unspoken knowledge around the office that the whole thing was just a jobs program and it was never going to work.
- Giorgi 5y agoSo if nobody is going to mention Command and Conquer - Tiberian Sun - I will! The unit was called "Subterranean APC".
- servytor 5y agoThere are thousands of miles of tunnels beneath the continental United States... Abandoned mine shaft, subway systems, unused service routes, and deserted mine shafts Many have no known purpose at all.