USN AN-1 Submarine Aircraft Carrier (2018) | Hacker News Reader

USN AN-1 Submarine Aircraft Carrier (2018)

hisutton.com

120 pointsluu90 comments

As someone working on ship design for a few decades I can attest that this site is an amazing resource for whacky concepts and also new concepts, internationally, that were/are being experimented with but were/are fairly under wraps. I have no idea where the owner gets the info from - probably scraped off of remote corners of the web (non-english posts), but a few times a year someone sends me a link to this site and something inevitably blows my mind. A lot of times very good concepts are abandoned due to a technology gap (e.g. control computers, materials limits, etc.) that no longer exist.

I think our industry likely owes a great deal of debt to the site owner for helping to consolidate and document this history so we don't waste time/money reinventing the wheel (saving us from iterative condemnation).

IIRC he does all of his original art in Paint too.

It looks like Russians send him stuff. Nothing really classified, but things like the photos of desktop models seem to come from people visiting various offices or agencies. Some Russian military facilities also run unofficial tours (whatever pays the bills) resulting in photos of stuff that would normally be behind locked doors/gates. His satellite imagery is all unclassified, mostly stuff available via google. You just have to know what you are looking at.

Covert Shores has such a reputation in the maritime community that he could probably just knock on the door and get a tour of their non-classified material. Old/scrapped subs are often just sitting on bases forgotten.

I've always wondered how one gets into ship design...

I worked with a guy who was a technology designer for billionaire level yachts, David Person - he worked on both of Larry Ellison's yachts (and houses) - but the yachts were made in Germany..

but how does one actually become a ship designer?

I'd presume in this modern time most are probably born with the connections, but aside from that... probably attempting to cold-contact everybody related to the profession you can find?

Naval Architecture is a degree at quite a few schools around the world. A lot of people seem to learn on the job though under apprenticeship like relationships.

MIT has some amazing exhibits of this stuff in one of their main buildings; not sure if they still have that degree offered. I want to say US MMA or something like that might have a program.

The industry is big, but sometimes feels small. Ships are mini-cities, so it takes all types of engineers:

-Naval Architect - (Specializes in hull form design and structures.) -Marine Systems Engineering - (all about the machinery plant design to make the ship move)

ME's and Navarchs work side-by-side.

Here is a list of schools with Navarch and Marine Engineering degrees [1]

Webb and USMMA (i.e. Kings Point) folks are all over the forefront of this industry.

These are the primary degrees. If you search the above two job postings, you will find plenty of companies working in Ship Design. These degrees will give a decent treatment to all of the fields needed to succeed in ship design.

Other specialists we work with: -Electrical Engineering -Hydrodynamicists -RF & Network Engineering (for C4I systems) -Mechanical Engineer -Data Science (demand increasing rapidly with the emergence of unmanned shipping) -Physics (especially thermodynamics) or Math -Materials Science -Mechatronics/Robotics -Logistics/Supply chain -Reliability Engineering -Shipyard (Production) Management -Simulations and Game developers The list really does go on...

I work with a mechanichal engineer who worked for an elevator design firm before entering our industry and they're one of the best 'marine engineers' I've worked with. Most everyone understands they don't know everything, and new perspectives are the womb of creativity, so people with varied backgrounds are welcomed.

Type of companies to look for:

1.) Defense contractors (e.g. General Dynamics, BAE, Gibbs & Cox, Gen. Atomics, many MANY more) 2.) Private Navarch/Marine Engineering firms 3.) Shipyards (NASSCO, HII, China Shipbuilding Industry Corp, Hyundai Heavy Industries, etc.) 4.) Cruiselines, Ferry lines and other commercial ship owners 5.) Workboat companies, and Offshore (e.g. oil) Industry 6.) Smaller yacht, racing craft, pleasure craft designers/builders.

1. https://www.google.com/search?q=schools+with+naval+architect...

P.S. - I'm in dire need of a solid data scientist (big data analytics/sensitivity anaysis, model building), so if someone's interested, send me your contact info.

How do they land? Or are they disposable aircrafts? Also the whole point of a submarine is to stay stealth until it is required. Which means the pilots would get very little flight time / training.

They were to be VTOLs, so very carefully.

The Japanese and British used float planes.

I would assume the project was scrapped because it is basically impossible to land on a submarine.

It is hard enough to land a helicopter on a ship with a proper flight deck. But landing a much less stable VTOL on a tiny submarine without any sizeable flight deck in the 60s was completely out of the question.

> But landing a much less stable VTOL on a tiny submarine without any sizeable flight deck in the 60s was completely out of the question.

Hey, it was the 1960s. The times when people pulled off stunts like dropping a payload less than a meter wide from a satellite and catching it mid-air[0], without anything resembling a computer available to design or coordinate such missions. I'm pretty confident they could get a VTOL to land on a submarine, if they seriously put their minds to it.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corona_(satellite)

Don't forget they landed on the moon as well. Raw power can compensate for a lot of shortcomings in other areas!

Hawker Siddeley Harrier (1967) was a VTOL that could have done this, although I don't think even Eric Brown was quite mad enough to try it.

He did try the "rubber flight deck", an equally crazy scheme: why not save weight on landing gear by having a rubber deck just after the arresting gear, so the aircraft would catch the hook and belly-flop onto it?

https://www.pen-and-sword.co.uk/blog/david-hobbs-british-air...

Well i am sure you can find some daredevil who can do such a landing under the right conditions.

But the military requirements are such, that good conditions are not the norm.

There are missions in harsh weather (and weather at sea is a completely different animal compared to weather on land or in the air at a few kilometers height).

Up in the sky the conditions are stable and picking up a parachute with an aircraft is something you can easily retry a few times when you fail.

Missing the landing on a submarine results in a sunken aircraft (and possibly pilot).

Pilots have varying skill levels and are expensive to train just look at training requirements for the people landing on aircraft carriers.

If you look at loss rates of military aircraft in any period you will find, that a astonishing portion of the losses are due to accidents.

Landing a hard to control VTOL on a small spot on a submarine (which itself is somewhat small and thus unstable) will cause a tremendous amount of attrition among the aircraft and pilots.

It is just far more efficient to shot a cruise missile at a target, than going through the hassle of having aircraft drop a bomb and then return with a low chance of survival.

I accept your reasoning. Still, I raise you a C-130 with rocket engines bolted to it.

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

It's a 1980s idea, though.

Well the payload itself was small but they were aiming for the line between the payload and it's parachute which is a much larger target.

The Japanese I-400s were originally fitted with float planes, but these became fire-and-forget kamikaze aircraft by the end of the war (planned attack on the Panama canal that never happened).

The Germans had an autogyro that was let out on a cable from the U-boat, used for spotting. Not sure if this ever saw production / combat, but IMO that's already at the limit of what is sensible in submarine aviation.

They actually did attack Oregon with a similar setup (but an I-25 submarine) . They dropped some incendiary bombs on the forests near Bandon, OR hoping to cause massive fires, damage war critical timber production, etc.

I guess they didn't think about how hard it is to start a forest fire on the Oregon Coast in winter though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_submarine_I-25#Fourth...

The cylindrical hull that makes submarines efficient under water makes them roll a lot when on the surface. That would make it very difficult to handle planes (whether taking off or landing).

> ... landing a much less stable VTOL on a tiny submarine without any sizeable flight deck in the 60s was completely out of the question

Reminded me of this incident where a Royal Navy Harrier landed on a container ship. https://www.airspacemag.com/military-aviation/oldies-amp-odd...

Float planes... that could work. Land on the water next to the submarine, then get towed back into the sub by a winch.

Nope. Here it is, the Ryan X-13.[1] First VTOL jet. Landed tail-first and hooked itself to a raised platform. As a demo, one was landed at the Pentagon in 1957.

If there had been a need, a fleet of VTOL-fighter carrying submarines would have been built. The USSR never built a navy which required something like this to counter it.

I came across this in my days in aerospace, and an ex-Navy fighter pilot at work said he didn't see that landing as a difficult task.

[1] https://youtu.be/xT38UcpHFXY

In fact first VTOL designs existed almost 15 years earlier in Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focke-Wulf_Triebfl%C3%BCgel

Also vertical Start was already tested with real designs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bachem_Ba_349 even when it ended badly

I seem to recall in the late 80s and early 90s the idea of submarines being able to launch surface to air missiles being discussed. If you're a sub and a helicopter is dipping a sonar, you know exactly where the helo is but you cannot shoot at it, even if you surfaced. The idea, as I recall, was to release some buoyant device that, when it surfaced, would launch 1 to 4 SAMs that would go into active seek mode and then lock in on whatever flying object they found. Lots of things can go wrong with this idea... which is probably why nothing has been in the military media about it.

That's a thing that's being implemented at the moment.

https://defense-update.com/20120214_idas-submarine-launched-...

Russians used to keep shoulder launched SAMs also. Less useful for obvious reasons though.

From your link:

"The fiber optical link would then be used by the crew to verify the target, confirm the intercept and perform battle damage assessment."

This thing is literally dragging a fiber optic cable behind it, with a sensor package that is apparently left behind at the sea surface when the missile transits into the air, that allows the submarine to see the helicopter target before and after missile impact, and to abort the missile strike if necessary.

Now that you've got submarines with vertical launch cells like the latest Virginia class I've wondered about some of the possibilities. Since those are capable of holding Tomahawks, they certainly are large enough to hold an SM-2 or SM-6 SAM missile (though I doubt they could fire those unmodified). Having a submarine with long range SAMs open up some interesting tactics. You detect a bunch of enemy fighters sortieing out to engage one of your ships with an airborne early warning aircraft or fighter on a long range patrol. All of a sudden, way before they enter range of your ship's SAMs, a submarine surfaces, launches a bunch of SAMs, and the aircraft that detected the enemy fighters guides them to targets using cooperative engagement. With this technique all you need is a submarine and a fighter or early warning aircraft and you effectively get a guided missile destroyer which is profoundly hard to detect. Fighter might be a better choice, so it can chase off ASW helos and aircraft without needing the submarine to surface and waste some of its own SAMs.

Lots of things can go wrong of course, and I'm sure it would take a ton of engineering effort to make it happen, but it's certainly an interesting concept.

This was one of the operational concepts for Lockheed's Sea Shadow.

The Outer Air Battle was keeping Navy planners up at night, so the idea of laying a clandestine SAM trap far out in front of the carrier battle group seemed like a really attractive idea. Using a combo of LPI radar and data links from other sensors for targeting, the low observable ships could be in just the right spot to surprise that regiment-sized raid of Backfires with a bunch of missiles fired from VLS cells.

Yes, its fairly mainstream these days. Most subs have SAMs, or manpads. To pick a classic example, this article on the same site about Typhoon http://www.hisutton.com/The%20REAL%20Red%20October%20-%20Typ... says there are manpads in the sail.

British and Israeli subs experimented with blowpipe slaved to the periscope, which was a truly useless SAM. Those kinds of details are buried in the articles on that site :)

I'd guess that the idea isn't so much to actually sneak up on aircraft, but rather to give them something to evade while the sub tries to make its escape.

Honestly, after watching Dark Doc's on YT I have to say that the military is totally open to the most craziest ideas as long as it has the potential to raise their game.

Whilst the nature of the engineering is pretty awful and causes unwarranted pain it does make you think about the level of creativity to cause as much damage as possible.

It's less "engineering is pretty awful" and more "What risk are we willing to accept vs tactical/strategical gain"

It really is. The level of confidence from test pilots to initial designers to firstly propose ideas and then have someone sit inside and try it out is pretty interesting too.

I think the real take-away is that the boundary for "good idea" is determined almost entirely by funding. The military has such a firehose of cash that they can throw money at almost anything and see what sticks.

If we spent $718.69 billion on art funding every year, you'd probably see artists making skyscrapers out of butter or genetically cross-breeding birds and mammals for creative speciation.

:) art students could consider this route post studies, military creativity courses with essentially unlimited funding. It really is astounding to see how many millions/billions then and now can go into failed projects.

Given that carriers are increasingly boxed out from shore by anti-ship missiles and drones are a lot smaller than crewed aircraft, I wonder if this design concept is due for a revival.

I could imagine drones launched vertically with single-use rocket boosters that would then land on the water for retrieval. You could get much closer to shore than a carrier while still carrying out a pretty effective air strike, especially with several subs.

Apart from the "reusable" part, your proposal sounds a lot like cruise missiles, which subs can and do launch. True, reusable is nice. But a cruise missile can also carry a lot bigger payload than a reusable drone can.

Reusability creates a lot more complexity vs just cruise missiles. Current generation US attack subs have multi-purpose tubes that can launch underwater drones, etc. So they are designed for some flexibility, but the main use is just tomahawk missiles.

Didn't everyone design one of these while doodling on the back of a notebook while bored in third grade? Several of my classmates came up with more plausible designs... If it takes three engines' thrust to take off vertically, one engine won't be able to land vertically, even if we ignore the only-recently-solved-now control issues.

Not sure about 3 times less, but planes are usually lighter when they come in to land, than they are taking off. (Fuel etc)

Harriers, F-35s, and Ospreys are all VTOL aircraft that could’ve launch from a sub. The other airplanes have only one engine and the osprey 2. They already land vertically on carriers.

I don’t think the image in the article would’ve worked where planes take off going straight up without additional thrusters.

Using actually-functioning aircraft, as you suggest, would also be more plausible than TFA. The maintenance requirements of the specific aircraft you mention might preclude submarine deployment, however.

> Harriers, F-35s, and Ospreys are all VTOL aircraft that could’ve launch from a sub. The other airplanes have only one engine and the osprey 2. They already land vertically on carriers.

F-35s and Ospreys didn't exist when this was proposed (the Harrier, but not the Harrier II, did), and the use of a Mach-3 fighter after consideration of the F11F suggests that the role envisioned for the fighters was interception, which is at best a secondary role of the F-35, and not a role of the Harrier (and even less the Osprey).

> I don’t think the image in the article would’ve worked where planes take off going straight up without additional thrusters.

I doubt it would have been practical for recovery at sea; launch would have worked better, and, IIRC, both were demonstrated successfully with prototype aircraft on land.

I imagine we'll see a return to this idea now that drones are becoming more ubiquitous.

Drones launched from submarines are already a thing: https://www.defensenews.com/naval/2020/12/07/the-us-navy-wan...

They use tubes for launching flares and buoys that the subs are already equipped with, and perhaps in the future also the larger vertical missile tubes for bigger drones.

It is already a thing. Cruise missiles are basically pilotless airplanes. They have wings, they have air breathing engines, they navigate and manoeuvre like an airplane (bank to turn most of them for example).

Cruise missile carrying submarines are a staple of the US strategy. Every significant engagement starts by such a submarine rolling in and unleashing the cruise missiles to suppress the enemy air defences. And again the cruise missiles are pilotless aircraft in everything but name.

Cruise missiles do not return to base. Also I don't know of any cruise missile that is used for reconnaissance but I may be uninformed. Are any cruise missiles launched and then flown around until you notice something of interest to sink?

Problem with using a cruise missile for recon is that it looks exactly like a missile.

>Are any cruise missiles launched and then flown around until you notice something of interest to sink?

No they don't, but they can change the target in flight, flight evasive maneuvers, coordinate each others and so on, but they are missiles and not Drones.

It's a flexible distinction. Loitering munitions and combined ISR+kinetic portable weapons are a major focus area for medium to small militaries, and consequently as a product for arms exporters.

The key benefit is providing tactical situational awareness for militaries that may not have such a capability at the strategic level (e.g. optical satellites, high endurance drones, air superiority).

Israeli and Turkish systems were used in the recent Azerbaijan-Armenia conflict.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loitering_munition

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9V9mbC-Esmg

>It's a flexible distinction.

No Cruise Missiles are not used for observations.

Hence the name of Loitering Munition as suicide drone or kamikaze drone, but there are similarity's, but with a shift of the focus.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loitering_munition#Comparison_...

But you could say the same about Rockets, some Missiles have them, but also Space-rockets and even Aircraft's or Drones (shorter starts or landings)

Let's not be pedantic. From the wikipedia link: "Loitering munitions fit in the niche between cruise missiles and unmanned combat aerial vehicles (UCAVs) sharing characteristics with both. They differ from cruise missiles in that they are designed to loiter for a relatively long time around the target area, and from UCAVs in that a loitering munition is intended to be expended in an attack and has a built-in warhead."

That's what i wrote:

>but there are similarity's, but with a shift of the focus.

"I don't know of any cruise missile that is used for reconnaissance"

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/us-navy-raytheon-de...

Sounds like it "works", but I don't know that it was practical enough for any real field use.

AFAICT, the planes AN-1 planes might as well not either; the article doesn't mention landing at all.

The article mentions they were VTOL, e.g. vertical take off and landing. They were to land vertically on their tails. It's not a very good idea, particularly with the technology of the time, but a few projects were experimenting with it. The X-13 Vertijet is an example from the 1950s.

> Are any cruise missiles launched and then flown around until you notice something of interest to sink?

Sort of, there are loitering munitions which essentially hang out until they find a target and then engage it. The IAI Harpy from the late 80s is a pretty good example. It's an anti-radiation missile, meaning it locks on to enemy radar signals and uses that to home in and destroy them, degrading enemy air defenses. Usually an aircraft would have to detect an enemy radar signal and then fire the missile. With the Harpy, you simply fire it and it hangs around, potentially for 2 hours, waiting until it detects an radar signal, at which point it engages.

The tomahawk missile in theory could be capable of loitering behavior. It already has a 2-way datalink, allowing it to send information back to a controller and the controller to send commands to the missile. It even has a camera and can transmit images back to the controller, which I believe is used for bomb damage assessment. All you would need to do is add some sort of seeker device to the missile and some software modifications.

>And again the cruise missiles are pilotless aircraft in everything but name.

No you mean drones not missiles, an aircraft is not made to explode, one exception:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yokosuka_MXY-7_Ohka

The Germans also had the Fi 103R which their test pilots flew a few times but was never put into combat.

As for the reuse of drones, the first drone was a radio controlled de Havilland DH.82 (named Queen Bee.) This drone, and most subsequent drones until fairly recently, was a gunnery target drone. It's job was to be shot down in training, and was only made to fly once (like a drone bee, which dies after mating) The term 'drone' implied a single terminal flight until some years later, when it also came to refer to reusable unmanned aircraft in general.

True but Missiles have explosives in it...drones "normally" don't...in the modern day, in the old days everything was a bit more mixed together.

> Cruise missile carrying submarines

At first glance I interpreted this the other way.

Yet it still might be interesting to drop a reconnaissance submarine from a passing cruise missile.

> At first glance I interpreted this the other way.

This is why English has a guideline that compound adjectives preceding a noun should usually be hyphenated:

Cruise-missile-carrying submarines.

Cruise missile delivered mine is something to think about... Plenty of close in guns and missiles to prevent direct attack, yet you could very rapidly area-denial an area with cruise missile delivered mines.

If a naval patrol covers more than two hours per leg, they can deny incoming missiles from directly hitting a carrier or whatever but they can't deny missiles incoming 100 miles away at the same time. Either way it prevents the carrier from operating in the area.

Mustard did a fascinating episode about the Japanese version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxyk84t4Q8w

Mark Felton did cover that as well on YouTube.

On the subject of aircraft launched from a submarine, a rotary winged kite was developed in Germany during WWII for reconnaissance. Compact when disassembled, it could be deployed in minutes, tethered to the sub while it motored upwind, allowing a lookout to see much farther over the horizon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focke-Achgelis_Fa_330

Examples are on display at many museums, including the Deutsches Technikmuseum in Berlin.

For everybody that criticizes this, remember, every successful idea is accompanied with a bunch of wild and crazy ideas and it usually takes time to figure out which ones exactly are good.

I expect that somebody said at some point, "Planes on ships? That must be the stupidest idea I have ever heard!"

It is easy to criticize with the help of hindsight. Most people at a certain point would say a page to connect school peers would never become one of the largest corporations on Earth. Were all these people stupid or is this just effect of having seen it happen?

>I expect that somebody said at some point, "Planes on ships? That must be the stupidest idea I have ever heard!"

I don't know about that. Before the invention of the airplane we already had balloon carriers - ships that carried balloons for observation in naval engagements.

The first flight of a fixed wing aircraft happened in 1903. By 1910 a plane had already taken off from the armored cruiser USS Birmingham.[0] The French converted the Foudre to be a seaplane carrier in 1911 after the invention of the seaplane in 1910.

Planes launched from ships were used in World War I. For example, HMS Engandine was a freight ship that was converted into a seaplane tender and commissioned in 1914. In 1916 she took part in the Battle of Jutland. HMS Ark Royal was a purpose built seaplane carrier and was commissioned in 1914. She also took part in World War I.

Later we got the flat-deck carriers. HMS Argus was converted in 1918, USS Langley in 1920. The first purpose built flat deck carriers were the Japanese Hōshō and British Hermes. They were commissioned in 1922 and 1924 respectively, but the Hermes was laid down first in 1918.

Funnily enough, the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922 cancelled the production of more battleships and battlecruisers. This led to the USS Lexington and USS Saratoga being converted to carriers. And eventually carriers made direct surface combat ships obsolete.

Planes on ships probably wasn't a crazy idea.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Birmingham_(CL-2)

I am not versed in that part of history. Probably you are right, it might not have been that crazy idea.

But I have read a lot of other history, especially WW2 and Cold War, and it is kinda normal that military throws a lot of crazy ideas. In the end even if a very small portion of those ideas bring fruit it typically tends to give the edge that you need in conflict.

So I try to not criticize too much because people who prepared this were probably asked to do exactly that -- go wild with their ideas with low probability anything they produce is going to bring fruit.

At the time this submarine aircraft carrier has been prepared:

- Cold War was at its high

- US just started using atomic power for everything they did and it seemed nuclear reactors and atomic power are going to solve any problem from going very long time under sea to having planes reach orbit and other planets

- US had nuclear bombs but had trouble maintaining ability to reach USSR territory with them. Having ability for a submarine surface close to USSR territory and launch completely unexpected attack would be huge advantage and deterrent

- US did not have working ICBMs and only perception that USSR is leading in development of these, so there must have been huge pressure to get ANYTHING to maintain deterrent.

Now, given that kind of environment this idea doesn't sound so stupid anymore. At least not more stupid that warships made of ice and wood chips.

The Japanese Navy had similar ideas [1] in WWII. The plan was to sail undetected to near the west coast, launch the planes, and drop some biological weapon. Basically the predecessor of today's missile-carrying submarines.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-400-class_submarine

Read the article, specifically the section headed: "Earlier aircraft carrying submarines".

> "Some biological weapon"

It was a box of plague fleas.

See also: Operation Cherry Blossom at Night

Here's a good video on these from Mustard:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxyk84t4Q8w

They have loads of content on weird military hardware like this.

Based on the same Covert Shores article, a Popular Mechanics article [1] has more TL;DR context in the title, The U.S. Navy Could Have Had a Submarine Aircraft Carrier, and opening:

> During the 1950s, the advent of the atomic age forced the U.S. Navy to look at a number of alternate basing schemes for naval aviation. One such scheme was AN-1, an enormous nuclear-powered submarine that could launch eight fighter jets in just under eight minutes.

> Although AN-1 was never built, it’s a fascinating look at a ship that could have been.

[1] https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/navy-ships/a252415...

Yeah, getting from underwater confinement and blasting into the air should do works on your health

Submarines like that do not use pressurized atmospheres. They hold back the water pressure using the strength of the hull alone. (Also the aircraft would be launched when the submarine was surfaced.)

Holding back the sea pressure is implicitly holding the submarine at atmospheric pressure.

I suppose that's a valid way of looking at it. Either way though, there's no risk of the crew experiencing decompression sickness in a typical military submarine.

The Belgorod makes much more sense:

http://www.hisutton.com/Spy%20Subs%20-Project%2009852%20Belg...

BTW: One can find it here:

Google Maps 64.58557915035752, 39.817968886716

Next to the only typhoon still in ~service

64.57990365204542, 39.791519636530744

Spoiler: Tail-sitting vertical take off and landing aircraft.

Sounds like Tuatha de Danaan in Full Metal Panic.

What's that Irish mythology don't in there?

What's that Irish mythology doing in there?

Or the UEF Atlantis in Supreme Commander.

i wonder how much money gets wasted on these failed explorations/projects.

I look at these explorations as eliminating concepts that don’t work, bringing you closer to finding the one that does; necessary investment

having worked for multiple dod contractors that did prototypes, lots.

Sad part is lots of the good ideas get culled when some head honcho doesn't like the dpt. it came from, or where the funding came from, because politics.

Lot of warfighters/ppl who are actually going to use the systems/products give us good feedback and then some O-6 comes on and doesn't like it or doesn't understand it.

> i wonder how much money gets wasted on these failed explorations/projects.

Failure is not a waste of money if lessons are learned. The value is in the lesson. As anyone whosed developed a reinforcement learning application knows, there is a balance between EXPLORATION and EXPLOITATION. If you don't explore, your performance will never improve. This is true even if 99% of the explored states are failures.

I suppose if one doesn't want to invest in exploration, one could always join an Amish township. They are very content and apparently happy with their perpetually static state of technological development - and there's nothing wrong with that until someone with a missile comes in to take over your land amd all you have to fend them off with is a hay fork.

> if lessons are learned

This is the key statement. Even in reinforcement learning exploring intelligently is an important problem. There’s no point exploring a new state if your world model is confident about what’s going to happen there: you won’t learn much.

Probably not a lot, paper is cheap. Typically a concept like this is explored by a team of 6-10 engineers over the course of 3-6 months, and they may work on multiple projects simultaneously.

Even if the project doesn't move past the concept phase, there can still be developments along the way that make it into other projects. Further, if a concept is abandoned because it is not technically feasible, identifying that it can't be done also identifies the limits of what currently can be done, which is good for determining research goals.

The cost of such a project should also be compared to the alternative: it's much cheaper to work through a design on paper and finding it's a dead end than to commit to something without that evaluation and find out 80% of the way through building it that it's a dead end.

Wow... All the weird stuff they come up with.

And sometimes it actually gets made. Like the Glomar Explorer. Wow.

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