Nomars: No Manning Required Ship

https://www.darpa.mil/research/programs/no-manning-required-ship

by croes • 1 year ago

25 50 1 year ago

I assume it has some kind of security built in because otherwise what would prevent a Russian dinghy from floating up and climbing on board

ahofmann• 1 year ago

As far as I understood, the attack vector is different. Entering the ship is useless, there are no controls for humans.

mjd2• 1 year ago

Useless unless you want to blow it up, maybe. Or steal or sabotage the cargo.

eesmith• 1 year ago

If so, that means the ship cannot visit any port, harbor or waterway which requires a locally qualified marine pilot onboard.

It also likely affects international treaties regarding the obligations of the master or officer in charge.

If the computers go down, and with no one aboard, is it considered abandoned? Can anyone claim salvage rights by hooking up a tow?

Currently, "vessels have an international duty to give reasonable assistance to other ships in distress for saving lives" (quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_salvage). How does that duty extend to uncrewed vessels?

I'm sure there are lawyers salivating at the chance to resolve these questions.

littlestymaar6• 1 year ago

It's never useless to get physical access to a computer system.

The fact that there's no driving wheel doesn't mean you cannot take control of the ship if you can plug your stuff to the right port.

barryrandall• 1 year ago

I'd be very surprised if there's not at least a debug port onboard.

gregoriol2• 1 year ago

Why would one climb on board if the thing is not meant to be manned and doesn't have any controls on board?

Anyway, if I were to design such a thing for military, it would probably have some self-destruct option

pandemic_region• 1 year ago

Why would one climb on board if the thing is not meant to be manned and doesn't have any controls on board?

to drop a grenade down a vent ?

Anyway, if I were to design such a thing for military, it would probably have some self-destruct option

What would trigger the self-destruct in your design ?

KineticLensman3• 1 year ago

Anyway, if I were to design such a thing for military, it would probably have some self-destruct option

I'm reminded of the classic evil-overlord design mistake of putting a large self-destruct button very prominently on the big control panel that is close to the cell where you keep 007 Bond to gloat and give away your plans instead of just shooting him.

Cthulhu_2• 1 year ago

I mean if they get a dinghy close enough it's already lost, since that could also be a torpedo or whatever.

rspoerri2• 1 year ago

First the terminators controlled the sea. They blocked the trade routes and fishing.

actionfromafar• 1 year ago

s/terminators/Amazon terminators/

rkagerer• 1 year ago

Is it remote controlled, or some kind of autonomous behavior program?

mjd2• 1 year ago

The article is really lacking all details.

Is this a fighting ship, or materials transport, or something else? Is it intended to go from A to B, or to go out and patrol around and come back? How far away does it go from its base?

gertrunde• 1 year ago

At this stage it looks like it's just a prototype/technology demonstrator for testing.

Other articles have mentioned testing automated refueling systems for this vessel, which implies a longer term patrol role.

Other naval vessels of similar displacement seem to generally have a range around 1500-2500 nm.

(All guesswork I'm afraid!)

mathgeek• 1 year ago

It took me far too long to realize you meant nautical miles and not a mistyped nanometers. More coffee needed.

trhway• 1 year ago

Btw, the Ukrainian sea drones are already themselves carrying drones and MANPADs. Evolution from the ground up.

ponector3• 1 year ago

Yes, their sea drones are already carrying both sea and air kamikaze drones. No evidences how effective they are, though.

littlestymaar6• 1 year ago

I can easily imagine how you could keep the mission crew out of the ship, having every operations being remote controlled.

But this is only a part of the crew: on a ship you have plenty of sailors who are onboard not because they are needed for the mission itself, but because you need them to keep everything running.

Having no one onboard means you cannot fix anything that starts misbehaving on the ship, and the likelihood of the ship being at least partly unavailable grows with the duration of the mission. You can work around that with redundancy or thanks to dedicated support ships with technicians onboard not too far away that can intervene when needed, but that needs to be taken into account.

I'm not saying that this kind of automation isn't possible or even desirable, just that it's in no way magical and it will need a complete rethinking of how military vessels operate, because if you just expect a warship to sail autonomously for 3 months without issues, you're going to be disappointed.

Almondsetat2• 1 year ago

it's in no way magical and it will need a complete rethinking of how military vessels operate

"designing a seaframe from the ground up with no provision, allowance, or expectation for humans on board"

I think the thousands of engineers that made this crewless seaframe possible thought about it being crewless and all of which that entails.

littlestymaar6• 1 year ago

The part you quote is explicitly not about the engineers of the vessel. It's about everybody else in the Navy!

What I'm saying is that we are all used to operate in a certain way, and you cannot really expect the automated system to fawlessly adapt to the way you already operate. To benefit from the automation you need to change the way you operate in depth, and that's a much harder thing to do in the military than in the civilian world (where it's already not that easy in practice).

The engineering side of things is always the easiest part of the job, no matter how challenging one particular engineering achievement is.

turnsout• 1 year ago

And you can always send in a chopper with some seamen if needed

datadrivenangel• 1 year ago

Moving from a navy ship model to an air force plain model where the vehicles rarely undergo maintenance or repairs during operation is plausible, but salt tends to be bad, and over longer operations the errors are more likely to accumulate to a point of capability loss.

littlestymaar6• 1 year ago

Exactly. Operating those for missions of a few days near your shores is going to be easy, keeping them functional for long overseas operations isn't.

countWSS• 1 year ago

Could it even compete with modern submarine drones/underwater gliders that are thousands of times cheaper/smaller and can cripple these bulky ships in seconds?

gorgoiler2• 1 year ago

Someone once said that looking for a ship on the ocean is like trying to find your car keys in a field with a pair of binoculars.

Obviously this applies less to littoral waters (1.5 dimensional instead of 2 dimensions of open water) but still: how does scale factor into trying to task sea drones with hunter/killer roles?

Also, always worth pointing out that while tactical warfare is a technological battle — in which drones may indeed be superior — war is also a strategic, political act and as such the presence of large scary ships — even 250t ones — is often enough to achieve ones strategic aims.

digdugdirk• 1 year ago

Love that analogy. But on the topic of your final point - I agree with you, but I do think we're rapidly approaching the era where ships of this size will be difficult to defend from a mass drone strike, easily coordinated via a combined air/surface/submerged drone swarm.

At that point, the asymmetric reward of sinking one of those large scary ships is going to be irresistible for both state and non-state actors, specifically for those same strategic and political aims.

Cthulhu_2• 1 year ago

how does scale factor into trying to task sea drones with hunter/killer roles?

The Black Sea is a good example of how that went down; using US intelligence - could be sattelite imagery, radar, or a combination thereof - they were able to pinpoint the Russian ship(s), giving their drone ships enough guidance to head there. And as long as there's no signal jamming, it could be remote controlled to its final destination if needs be.

krisoft2• 1 year ago

Someone once said that looking for a ship on the ocean is like trying to find your car keys in a field with a pair of binoculars.

That is true if you try to look for a ship visually. But nobody would do that. Everyone uses radar. The radar can be mounted on the shore, on a rig, on a ship, on an airplane, or on a satellite.

Or you use underwater microphones. Those can be mounted on the ocean floor, or a ship, or a submarine.

Neither of these share much with looking for your car keys with a pair of binoculars. The keys don't emit sound and the field does not transfer the sound as well as oceans do it. And the keys don't light up as nicely as a ship on a radar image. So i'm not sure what aspect of maritime surveillance does that saying illuminate.

leeter2• 1 year ago

IMHO: Yes, subs are great when you need people to constantly be looking over their shoulder and spending tons of money on ASW. They are great at interdicting logistical shipping too. But, they are really really bad at being seen (that's kinda the point), and sometimes you want a unit to be seen to force an enemy to dedicate forces to take care of it. Look at the amount of forces the allies dedicated to sinking Bismark and Yamato. In both cases a not insignificant amount was dedicated to taking down a battleship and even then in both cases not without either significant losses on the allies side, or overwhelming force and waiting for the battleship to be uncharacteristically exposed.

Surface vessels can also provide direct fire which is actually a lot cheaper than a torpedo. The cost of a 5" shell is something like ~20k (2k per actual shell + fuse which I assume is at least 18k) vs $5.39M(2022, source wikipedia) for a MK48 torpedo. 5" gun mounts are pretty much fully automated at this point, they have places for sailors for emergency... but on a NOMARs ship you'd just YOLO on that and use a simplified version without the manual backups for weight savings.

One of the coolest things about this is not this operating on it's own, but operating with a larger manned surface vessel or sub. They act as a cheaper and disposable escort for a much more powerful vessel creating a force multiplier. This is pretty much identical to the "Loyal wingman" that has been under development for awhile.

TLDR: there is value in having a ship being a visible target and having a gun. There is also value in having both NOMARs and manned ships working together.

foobarian• 1 year ago

The cost of a 5" shell is something like ~20k

A single shell?!? I am in the wrong business...

Telemakhos• 1 year ago

Is a 5" shell really ~$20k? I thought it was more like $2k.

pjdesno• 1 year ago

This would be great for civilian shipping in certain areas, as modern piracy seems to exclusively focus on holding crew members for ransom.

Lots of comments here raise good questions about its fitness as a military vessel, but maybe the point is to develop tech that civilian vessels can use? Preventing piracy has always been viewed as a task of the military, and piracy-proofing civilian vessels would go a long ways towards meeting that goal.

BrandoElFollito• 1 year ago

I've wondering for a long time why we must have manned ships. I do not know anything about ships.

I guess the problem is not with navigation: we could have remote piloting when needed, from a central place. Redundant communication and all.

I believe that the other is that you need to maintain a ship when on sea? Make some small fixes awaiting to be in a harbor?

That one does require people for now.

Nomars: No Manning Required Ship

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