Stealth Boat the U.S. Government Won't Buy or Let Be Sold Abroad | Hacker News Reader

Stealth Boat the U.S. Government Won't Buy or Let Be Sold Abroad

bloomberg.com

169 pointsJimmyAustin125 comments

There are a few documented Government-suppressed inventions. One is Airadar.[1] This was a radar unit for light aircraft. It had a conformal antenna in the wing (the aircraft nose being occupied by the engine), phased-array scanning with no moving parts, and was much lighter than moving-dish radars. In 1973. The inventor came from a long career in avionics, and in retirement, developed this. It worked fine, was installed in an airplane, and was reviewed favorably in Flying Magazine.

This really bothered the USAF, because it was way ahead of military radars of the time. So there was a patent secrecy order, and Airadar disappeared. It was decades before such radars became common.

[1] https://books.google.com/books?id=NWzlTqj0gQ4C&pg=PA66

That is noteworthy and repulsive. To think, the safety of the flying public was sacrificed because of the military's glacial pace.

Another example I am familiar with is NoblePeak Vision's shortwave infrared sensor technology which was prohibited from export.

Lame. USAF should know better.

Smart organizations co-opt innovation if it surpasses their own knowledge and technology.

Is it just me, or does $19M sound ridiculously low for building a prototype of a military vessel?

Most larger yachts that are built for rich people seems to cost around this ballpark, and for them I would expect that no new technology has to be integrated from scratch, in to the core design (as in: motors, geometry of the hull). Exceptionally ugly boats, like Venus built for the late Steve Jobs claim to cost $100M!.

With a innovative new concept, I expect a lot of individual systems to be prototyped, scrapped, reworked. Let alone the effort needed for designing this thing. This is a startup with 20 People (17 of them now being layed off) operating for several years building a SHIP.

Anyone having numbers for typical effort/money/time/headcount spent in designing and building novel boats?

Sure. My mother and her partner had a 70' motor catamaran built in Chile.

Custom job - designed by marine architect and customer. Custom hull, and mostly off the shelf running gear, big Cummins in each hull etc. Passagemaker, goes anywhere other than ice pack, huge range - they did a Pacific crossing a few years back without a refuel.

It took a team of 20 on/off (they work on a dozen or so boats concurrently), lots of calls and meetings, and cost about $2.5m all said and done. One would assume the shipbuilder made a decent profit. IIRC it didn't require much tweaking after sea trials.

The materials tend to be the cheap bit, it's skilled labour and design that costs you.

Well, the cost to an employer of 20 qualified engineers working for 3 years should be at least $10M. So you've spent >50% of that budget on just payroll + employee overhead.

So we have $9M left. There's a pair of 2000 shp turboshaft engines, something like the GE T700, costing around $2M total. Probably another $2M on drives and supercavitating propellers. Then there's all sorts of other equipment like radar, navigation, hydraulics etc. with $5M left. So I'm not sure it's entirely unreasonable.

But probably they're reporting a cost that's representative of what these would cost if someone went and ordered 10 of them.

Sure, if you got everything right on first try.

Is it just me, or does $19M sound ridiculously low for building a prototype of a military vessel?

Only because you've been desensitized by years of F35 budget overruns.

You underestimate the amount of markup that goes into a yacht. Most of that is in the interior and other stuff the occupants will see. This boat is a fraction of the size and likely got its entire interior from a government auction.

Without all the BigCo overhead you can build single prototypes with much less money.

If you support export controls for security reasons, this is kind of inevitable.

The government shouldn't be forced to buy any type of military technology someone creates. But even if the government won't buy your tech, it still can be dangerous in the hands of other countries.

One could argue that if the government is preventing you from selling your tech abroad - there should be some sort of compensation for this. Others could argue that's just the cost of being in the business of weapons manufacturing.

There is a process for compensation: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/35/183

According to the article, it simply rarely pays up; it's a shame they don't go more into why.

Development is the risk involved in that business no? After you have a contract you are guaranteed to sell a certain number of units and the risk disappears. Seems like a good way to private the gains and socialize the losses.

An inventor in that position doesn't have any negotiating power that's the why.

Could he denounce his US citizenship and move to, say, Moscow or China?

If he were willing to put himself in the a position where the US government could claim he had broken the law sure he could do whatever he wants. That would arguably make his bargaining position worse though because then he has the US government after him for what they will likely frame as espionage and he would be dependent on the good will of some other government which effectively puts him in an Assange Snowden style predicament.

One possible reason is it's very hard to prove the market value of something that you never sold.

You can say that your product is worth $1bn until you're blue in the face, but there won't be any evidence of that without any buyers.

I think it's more basic than that. The company has no BATNA (Best Alternative To Negotiated Agreement).

The Government never pays out on 28 USC 1498 claims (Government infringement of a patent) either. I once filed FOIA requests to get data on this.[1] The administrative claim procedure is useless. You have to file suit in the Court of Claims to collect.

One reason for this turns out to be that if the agency settles, it comes out of their budget, but if the agency loses in the Court of Claims, it comes out of a separate Treasury fund for claims against the Government.

[1] http://www.animats.com/foia/index.html

One should argue that being prohibited from talking about your technology is a 1st amendment violation, and if we are to have the concept of "Intellectual property" then the government banning you from selling it would be a 5th amendment violation with out just compensation.,

However given that the constitution is widely ignored by the US government today, with full support of the court system, it is unlikely that the constitution will protect anyone.

The government awards him both the patent and the intellectual property, the latter not being defined by the constitution.

Not quite. The government has patent laws to protect the rights of the inventor.

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

They've turned it upside down and made it protect the state instead. The constitution does not grant this power to the state.

The authority to create copyright and patent law is most certainly in the constitution, if it were not all copyright and patent law would be unconstitutional

People seem to forget what the constitution is, the Constitution grants government its power, if the constitution is silent on a matter than the government is suppose to be powerless, is not suppose to engage in that activity.

This means a whole host of things the government does, should be unconstitutional, but sadly the courts have interrupted the constitution to include powers it does not contain.

An interesting exercise would be to find court rulings that refer to "intellectual property" rather than to some specific thing that gets dumped in that basket.

> Others could argue that's just the cost of being in the business of weapons manufacturing.

Well, sure, you could argue that, but that argument justifies every rule that exists now or might in the future.

Not really. Military grade weapons are a big deal. They're used to kill people.

Export controls are there to prevent killing machines getting in the hands of a countries enemies (or potential enemies in the future)

This is only valid if

1. You live in the US

2. You believe the US government is moral and "good"

3. Any "enemy of the US" is evil

3 assumptions I am not willing to support

Or if, 4, you live/operate in the US, and are thus bound by their laws.

Not really. Every country that has weapons development also has export controls.

It isn't about believing your government is moral or good. Its about understanding that your government is responsible for the safety of citizens, and that your enemies will want to kill you (or at least kill your soldiers).

There is a sibling comment that was flagged to death that makes a reasonable point. The word "enemy" is used in political rhetoric as if enemies are a force of nature, like hurricanes or earthquakes. But "enemies" are just people, and there's very little discussion about why those people want to kill those other people, or how their existence is blowback (or even an intended result) from yet another operation against some previous enemy.

I would be much happier with US strategy if the discussion always began with metaanalysis of the motivations and origins of a putative enemy, with the focus on social and humanitarian means to prevent the formation of new problems.

That's too hard. Let's just precision carpet bomb them and let God sort it out. Any problems 20 years from now will be the next incumbent's problem.

What country do you live in?

Does it have any enemies?

Would you be upset if some local corporation sold breakthrough military technology to that enemy?

I live in the US

Yes the US has Enemies,

No I would not be upset is some local corporation sold breakthrough military technology to that "enemy"...

I lived through the first cryptowars, I do not have the desire to give the government that kind of power

I see the resurgence of the new cryptowars on the horizon, government can not be trusted to choose what information should be public and what should be secret

Well for 1 & 2, this story is about a guy who is from the US, and is trying to sell military tech to the US. Either he supports the US, or he doesn't care what his military tech is used for. Either way he can't really claim the moral high ground if he turns around and sells it to "enemy" countries.

But you don't really need to assume any of that. If you just assume that spreading military tech is a net negative, then this is good. I don't support the US's use of drones, but I especially don't want other countries to have drones. I don't support the use of nuclear bombs, but I certainly don't want other countries to have them. Whether the country is good or not, I think advancing military tech is at best neutral, and at worst very, very bad.

So then you should get off the internet, as the Internet is Military Technology

Better stop using that GPS as well, and about 1000000000 of other common everyday technology that was created for military reasons.

Obviously the internet and GPS are mostly used for civilian applications. Are you really going to argue that there is a huge civilian market for stealth boats?

GPS is still 100% military, the US Military can kill the civil band of GPS at any time it wants, all of the satellites are own, operated and maintained by US Sat Com.

The internet started as a ARPA research project, the fact that it is used by civilians today is not relevant to the conversation

You stated that "I think advancing military tech is at best neutral, and at worst very, very bad." GPS and the Internet are 2 prime examples of Military Tech has that massively improved the world. Nuclear Power being a 3rd, I can cite 1000's of others.

Nothing about dkopi's comment requires one to view the US as good and her enemies as evil, or for him to be American. Anyone whose gov't develops or pays other to develop weapons has at least a passive interest in those weapons not being turned on them.

Export controls are there to prevent killing machines getting in the hands of a countries enemies (or potential enemies in the future)

In practice that isn't, umm, practical. Consider the Falklands war - Argentina had Type 42 destroyers sold to them by Britain, and Exocet missiles sold by fellow NATO member France.

Those are more the exceptions that prove the rule, though. I don't see any other countries with B-2s or other major US weapons systems, unless the US intended it.

France sold Argentina the planes used to launch the missiles

In the past it was illegal to export cryptography, which lead to some ridiculous situations. I once found an export restriction that says it's illegal to export neural network technology (or at least if it's applied to ASICs or FPGAs.) I doubt many people in the industry are familiar with this. Now that Google is starting to produce NN ASICs and Intel is building NN instructions into its chips, this is a serious concern.

Indeed it is illegal to export a "Neural network integrated circuit" without a license, Commerce Control List (CCL) section 3A001.a.9.

Reasons cited for control: NS (National Security), MT (Missile Technology), AT (Anti-terror).

Export regulations have been relaxed since 1996 in the U.S. but export is still regulated and may require review and license from Department of Commerce's Bureau of Industry and Security.

Argh, export controls.

I wanted to buy a new rifle stock from the USA, but apparently since it's over US$100, it's a controlled export (firearm component). It's a damn piece of timber with a couple of holes in it!

Apparently I'd need an export certificate to get it out of the USA, which of course requires stacks of paperwork. No issues getting it into New Zealand though, no restrictions at all (I think magazines and receivers are the only parts that require import certificates).

This reminds me of the Sea Shadow:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Shadow_(IX-529)

The rumor was that the Navy didn't like it because the crew size was too small and no officer would want to be in charge of it as it would impact promotability. Also, Lokheed was not a traditional Navy supplier.

Congress didn't like it because it was too cheap. The best way to secure funding is to make it large and complex and involve as many congressional districts as possible.

I wonder if a drone version would have been more successful.

> The best way to secure funding is to make it large and complex and involve as many congressional districts as possible.

Proof that Congress, as a whole, is as corrupt as we usually think it is.

There's nothing inherently corrupt about trying to bring government jobs to your district. I guess you could call it vote buying, but EVERYTHING can be construed that way- lowering taxes, increasing expenditures, etc.

Perverse incentives, sure. A poor use of funds, yes. Corruption, not really.

It's no different to opposition to globalism on a national scale. The White House wants to keep jobs in the USA, senators and representatives want to keep those jobs in their state.

That rumor is silly nonsense. The Navy continues to operate small vessels, and commanding one doesn't impact promotability (unless the skipper runs his boat aground or something). The Sea Shadow was always intended as a one-off experiment. Some of the technology was successfully used in later designs for larger ships. Lockheed has been a major Navy defense contractor for decades.

“If the U.S. doesn’t want this, fine. But why not let us sell to friendly nations? We’ve had so much interest from countries like Japan, Korea, Qatar.”

My guess is that he's blowing smoke on both the capabilities of the ship and the interest from other countries.

How so?

Aircraft generally beat boats in an offensive role. The advantage boats have is the amount of stuff they can take with them. This loses out on the benefits of boats without any real clear benefit over aircraft.

He's certainly blowing smoke on the stealth capabilities, given the racket this thing will produce in the water.

Quite likely. Describing it as an "attack helicopter of the sea" sounds a lot like a hand-wavey excuse for not really having a clear idea what naval role the technology would actually fill.

Just demilitarize the thing and sell as a billionaire's toy for the confidential getaway from the swimming Versailles of a superyacht you already have. "The dinghy? Yeah, it was so advanced the Navy did not know what to do with it so I got it on the cheap", I imagine it would make a great conversation piece.

Edit: I might be basing my mental model of billionaires too much on the writings of Neil Stephenson though..

> Quite likely. Describing it as an "attack helicopter of the sea" sounds a lot like a hand-wavey excuse for not really having a clear idea what naval role the technology would actually fill.

That sounds about right.

I would also add that it may indicate that it has a very limited payload capability and very limited speed for its size. The Juliet Marine Systems' marketing brochure mention their Ghost achieves speeds above 30 knots, which in practice indicate that its top speed is 30 knots. That's the speed of a Zumwalt-class destroyer.

Meanwhile, the US Navy's littoral class ships have a top speed that goes above 50 knots, and the US navy has an assortment of small fast-attack crafts whose speed reaches 80 knots.

In fact, fast attack boats designed decades ago typically reach speeds above 40, and nowadays there are several military transport ships that reach higher speeds.

I'm note sure Korea/Japan really has interest in such patrol crafts. Pricey for what it offers.

Qatar? Maybe since they have oil money.

>> For now, Sancoff has decided to stop filing patent applications altogether. "We're afraid the government will come in and put more secrecy orders on us," he says.

I see this as a good thing.... IMO the protection patents provide are over rated in the first place (unless your a patent troll) for companies that are actually making something.

Of course it will not stop the State Dept from using ITAR to kill your business.

>Senator Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.) has weighed in on Sancoff’s behalf.“It doesn’t seem right for the U.S. government

What does not seem right is the US government can issue secrecy orders in the first place... That is what does not seem right. That seems like a clear 1st amendment violation to me.

Cavitating structures produce huge sonar returns, I think this boat's 'stealth' is greatly exaggerated.

Exactly - great you can't see it on radar, but you can hear it from 50km away.

I guess anti-air applications you can imagine this should be fine.

Helicopters can drop sonobouys.

Also, after watching the video, it doesn't even look like it presents a closed Faraday volume through the windshield (there's usually a wire mesh with a specific transimpedance measured with conformal antennas). It looks like somebody made an angular catamaran, slapped "stealth" on it, and is surprised they don't get an exemption as an arms manufacturer and that the Navy isn't interested in their design.

LO is hard work - the compute time and LO stack up costs way more than the 15 million. And did this company take a scale model and do a full LO radar test out to 40GHz? Did they do field trials?

Some people actually DO that work, and it's hard and expensive. You can't just slap 'stealth' on things. I mean even the coating lifetime in production volumes in a sea-salt atmosphere is, by itself, a serious problem. Just... Ugh.

I'd guess that he thought, "RADAR stealthy", and just ignored the fact that you could hear it coming miles away.

Cynical me says why not sell it to Blackwater or Xi or whatever they call themselves today? Heck, get in touch with a drug cartel, have them set up a US corporation to buy the thing and walk away.

Alternatively, leave the boat and move to one of those countries and set up shop there.

I think the real lesson to be learned, never do spec work.

> Heck, get in touch with a drug cartel, have them set up a US corporation to buy the thing and walk away.

> Alternatively, leave the boat and move to one of those countries and set up shop there.

While this might allow them to sell the boat to somebody it might also get them in trouble if they ever plan on coming back to the US.

This is basically the fear of every defense company with any presence in the United States. It's well known within the industry that you can get screwed like this.

> The Navy and the U.S. Department of Justice declined to comment.

ITAR decisions are made by the State Department. Why not ask them?

It may be invisible to radar, but with all those bubbles and that in my eyes enormous (for its size) wake (glanced from the video at http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-08-21/juliet-mar...), how stealthy can this thing be?

If someone creates a dangerous army of robots, or a dangerous biological weapon on American soil I hope your government destroys it.

Compensation sounds ridiculous.

It's a false equivalence. Especially since the stealth isn't the only technology that they've developed, there's also the supercavitating pontoons (I guess they're pontoons), which would have an application for civilian watercraft as well.

I'm not saying that it is as dangerous as the things I mention. It is the US government that deems it too dangerous (forbidding it to be sold to other nations).

In Holland there was a strain of bird flu created. I would have not been opposed to the government stepping in.

Nuclear proliferation is another obvious example.

You state that there are civilian applications. I would say that that is irrelevant. :-) I don't even know how to start addressing that argument. Is it okay to develop potential dangerous tech as soon as you can earn money with it through civilian applications? And why is it not possible to destroy the stealth boat and keep the "supercavitating pontoons"? Is there some dark tech-karma that requires a bomb made for every pill?

I think the problem is that the supercavitation technology is restricted (it has applications for torpedoes).

If this sort of treatment by the government isn't a reason to relocate to another more welcoming country, I don't know what is.

Better make sure that country is a proper friend. If you take stealth tech to somewhere like china you can expect a noose if you decide to come back.

In theory, couldn't their market be commercial rather than just defense/government ? Couldn't the propulsion system still be built for a non-radar deflecting passenger/payload structure on the top ?

Or their goal from get go was to be able to become a defense contractor/supplier ?

[EDIT]:Just saw the video again. The primary goal indeed is to cater to the defense segment.

That's probably how the established companies that sell military equipment keep their edge. Influence decision makers to not buy equipment from a company who built a revolutionary equipment and strangle them with so much restriction, then wait until it shriveled to almost nothing and desperate for a buyer, buy the technology patents at a bargain and build another one under their own names that will be approved by the same decision makers and bill them exorbitant prices for each. I hope the ones that got laid off, get hired quickly.

There's a very simple explanation for their behaviour, and the "yes you can/no you can't" approach.

They already have a contract for similar with one of the regulars - Northrop or Lockheed or whoever. The project isn't going too well but they're not about to concede defeat, although they came close a few years back. Once in production they'll want US allies to buy from the same supplier for interoperability and profitability reasons, so will block the sale of the "wrong" product.

I mean, it's the only rational explanation - otherwise it'd be a no brainier to buy his boat.

In that case, it would be a no-brainer for the Big Defense Contractor to buy him out...which leads me to believe that the BDC has a better version already and doesn't need this guy's model. So he's in a tough situation where he's designed something that's better* than anyone else's in the world, except for his direct U.S. competition.

*According to this one guy, who owns the company, by the way.

> In that case, it would be a no-brainer for the Big Defense Contractor to buy him out...which leads me to believe that the BDC has a better version already and doesn't need this guy's model. So he's in a tough situation where he's designed something that's better* than anyone else's in the world, except for his direct U.S. competition.

This is very likely a big part of this guy's problem. Either the tech isn't as good as advertised or he's unwilling to sell. Maybe he doesn't think he'll get fair value, I don't know. Now, one could argue that it's unfair that we have a system that forces the little guy to sell out to the big guy, but that's a different argument.

Or maybe they don't see a use for it?

Looking at all the videos nobody needs to see a patent to build it anyway

You're confusing patents with trade secrets. Most anything can be reverse engineered, doesn't mean I am legally able to start reproducing and selling it.

Given the article states...

"the government served Sancoff with secrecy orders, which meant he wasn’t allowed to show the patents.....to anyone"

This pretty much makes the patents a trade secret now..

He can't do anything about the existing IP. But in the future, is it worth assigning the IP to a foreign holding corporation and applying for a foreign patent in a country with patent-respecting treaties with the US?

They can't order an Icelandic company to do anything, even if it happens to have American shareholders. And even if manufacturing is done in the US, the most they could do is seize the ships, and there are stronger protections for that.

Wouldn't that kill their chances to sell it to the US Navy, which they were hoping to do initially?

I don't know the military purchasing requirements, but it might be that there's no way to get around it using shell companies.

The State department handles this, right? I suppose that's why defense companies like Lockheed Martin donate a lot of money to certain political campaigns.

The USMC was able to buy Harriers, I don't think a foreign supplier is out of the question.

The USMC Harriers were, however, built under license by a US aviation company. Ditto a bunch of other British-designed aircraft used by the USAF, such as the English Electric Canberra aka Martin B-57 Canberra:

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_B-57_Canberra

(This traffic went in both directions: for example the British Army's AH-64D Apache Longbow gunships are built by Westland.)

If they're in any way sending information about these technologies abroad (e.g. to Icelandic patent authorities) they're violating ITAR.

These regulations were written by very smart lawyers specifically to avoid any clever hacks (aka loopholes) like this.

They simply publish them to a book, and send the book....

ITAR is unconstitutional on its face, sadly the courts have upheld it.

Phil Zimmermann and MIT Press showed everyone how to get around ITAR, 1st amendment trumps all

Information should be free....

> But in the future, is it worth assigning the IP to a > foreign holding corporation

But this would make the US-American individual coming up with the ideas (the "intellectual property") export it to a foreign nation. Which is exactly what currently seems to be prohibited by putting a secrecy order on the patents.

> They can't order an Icelandic company to do anything, > even if it happens to have American shareholders.

This company then better not employ any American engineers.

> He can't do anything about the existing IP. But in the future, is it worth assigning the IP to a foreign holding corporation

That would be an export.

Is there a video of this boat in real weather? That is, waves larger than the boat [1]. How does it cope without capsizing? Do its systems still work? Is propulsion retained if strong enough turbulence "breaks" the gas bubble around the floaters?

[1] e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dVkeh7wUm4 - the boat at the start is about the same size.

I'm willing to bet its more because other defense contractors that have a longer history with the government want them to buy their much more expensive equipment than some new company that isn't 'in' with the decision makers. I'm positive something this cheap would surely shake up the standard thats been going on far too long.

an interesting conundrum: if you make something deemed too dangerous to be sold abroad, is the government obligated to buy it from you?

Why would they be?

Well, in some way, aren't they partially seizing some of your property rights, and hence subject to the takings clause of the Fifth Amendment? I mean, sure, they aren't actually using it, but property is about control, not use.

They have the right to invalidate your patent, since that is a government-granted monopoly in the first place.

But the secrecy order is a separate matter.

Because it has effectively become the government's property. What else would you call it? If they control where it goes, who can look at it, how many can exist or be built. Those and many more are property rights. US Govt needs to pay up seeing as this is a fully mature platform. If it was just some drawings on paper then they wouldn't owe a dime.

First, a single prototype isn't a mature platform.

Second, what makes drawings suddenly less worthy of compensation than a single prototype? Don't they have value?

Third, it's not like the rules suddenly changed here. He knew the rules going in, and he built something he couldn't sell. That's a failure to find a market. Your idea opens up a scam of building impractical, yet dangerous weapons for government compensation.

How can he find a market if he's prohibited from selling it even to US allies?

Say you make a new kind of drug, the government is allowed to regulate it and prevent you from selling it. That doesn't oblige the government to compensate you for making something dangerous.

If its dangerous, then it is not a drug.

EDIT: If its only dangerous.

Plenty of drugs can be dangerous if they are misused and not properly regulated. You can grow poppies in your backyard, as long as you don't know/expect to milk them for opium.

I am 100% against regulation of Drugs, and the War on drugs so I would say no..

But even under current laws, if you make a new drug the government must go through a process to make it regulated and classify it. It is not automatically illegal.

By default all things are LEGAL until they are made ILLEGAL, not the other way around. The one exception to this is Medication, where in order to claim it treats as specific illness it must be approved by the FDA to treat that illness, the drug itself if not illegal per say, it just can not be proscribed by a doctor to treat X until it is approved to do so.

Further even in the regulations of Dangerous drugs they do not prevent someone from finding a market in other nations for them. There are a whole host of medications that have been not been approved by the FDA that are sold in other nations.

Replace "boat" with nuke and the argument starts to sound ridiculous. If I happen to find some plutonium in my backyard and build an improvised WOMD in my garage i dont expect the government to be obliged to sign a contract for buying 100s of them. Nor do I expect to be able to sell them to Isis, Japan, my neighbor or whoever else is ready to pay. In fact I would expect to be thrown into jail without even seeing court.

>>Replace "boat" with nuke and the argument starts to sound ridiculous.

Why would one do that, there is no law agaist making a boat, it is criminal to make a nuclear device.

Thus your argument is not only a Straw man but a moronic one at that.

>>>In fact I would expect to be thrown into jail without even seeing court.

Really? Then I feel sorry for the world you want to exist in. Even if you did build said nuke, I would expect you to get Due Process, but charged under the criminal laws of the land, and be held to account by a Jury of your peers

To believe the government should have the authority to throw you in jail with out trail is extremely dangerous.

I agree with the need for courts.

Apart from that there is a lot not criminal, but highly suspect:

+ 200W laser: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzUoe-9bKa0 + machine gun on quad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNPJMk2fgJU

The whole idea was to make the argument moronic to show the extreme end of the spectrum. Somewhere you have to draw the line, when does the boat become a weapon? Some weapons are also legal to posses, but others aren't, where do you draw that line? Is a kitchen knife a weapon? A sword? Are you allowed to export a sword? a gun? a RPG? armored personnel transport? A tank? A Helicopter? A jet fighter? Cryptography? Radars?

Regarding the court it's definitely not expressing my opinion, more like extra spices on the rant :) In case that wasn't obvious.

> Because it has effectively become the government's property. What else would you call it?

Danegeld.

Make it autonomous and you get quite nice illegal goods transportation machine.

Pentagon is notorious for steeling other people's inventions under secrecy laws. They probably already have some big defense contractor building exact replicas of his boat in secret right now.

Why would you ever use a boat for stealth? Wouldn't a submarine do a better job in every situation? If speed is needed a plane could do the job faster (and stealthier?) than a boat.

Littoral warfare is very fashionable right now.

Stealth != invisible.

Stealth means you show up on radar like a 15ft skiff (in the case of a ship) or a seagull (in the case of aircraft)

>Stealth means you show up on radar like a 15ft skiff (in the case of a ship) or a seagull (in the case of aircraft)

a seagull flying at Mach 1+ :) ... I know, i know, it is about distance you can detect the "seagull" from, not about classification.

Just take all documents, move to China or Russia and build a ton of these. That'd make the US think twice about messing with inventors.

I wonder what would happen if they put all the specs on a private server in the basement and some hacker broke in...

Hahaha, I see what you did there. That kind of behaviour only works out for the political class that is above the law.

Ask Gerald Bull how that works.

Really well until the enemies of your clients decide to off you?

I find the Gerald Bull story fascinating, definitely worth reading for anyone unfamiliar with it.

Sounds like they gambled, build military tech without contract, and lost.

Now they want taxpayers to pay for their failed bet.

Drones are easier to sell.

Why not move the company overseas?

Should've gone straight to SOFEX and offered it as a "commercial" platform. USG only wants anything if it's built by Raytheon, GD, or Lockheed-Martin.

I'm surprised someone hasn't yet come up with the "tech solution" to this problem.

One way out of this for Sancoff is to have The Russians™ hack his computer system and "steal" all his secrets, they'd have to pay in Bitcoin or that other one that launched yesterday, what was it? Zcash.

Also, he could sell the rights to the movie in a couple of years. From his Russian hideout.

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