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Comment by londons_explore | Hacker News Reader

The logical next step for these submarines is to go autonomous, and be minuaritized.

Small 6 feet long submarines which just head to a predetermined gps coordinate and travel at 1 mph, powered by a solar panel floating a few inches under the water surface would be very hard to detect without very specialist tech. They could probably be built for $1000 each without any custom built parts - simple RC plane servos, a compass and GPS, and an arduino should suffice.

The smugglers could then head out at their leisure and pick them out of the water after their 2/3 month transit time.

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This is what you're looking for: http://www.seacharger.com/

Made it from Cali to Hawaii, and then started on to NZ before it got crushed by something.

Still, fair distance to cover. And this was a first attempt. I'd bet there are plenty of these things out there moving drugs around.

He mentions receive contacts from drug smugglers via the website.

Edit: Looks like they've continued on building components: https://www.bluetrailengineering.com/

> what you're looking for

It's a boat, not a submarine. The low profile makes it harder to detect from the sea. Not from the air, though.

At max 2-3 knots it can only go with the current (not against). Needs calm-ish conditions, if it is to reach the destination as opposed to any random place.

That's a lot of naysaying for a boat that autonomously got itself from California to Hawaii successfully.

I'm saying: how sure can I be that the experiment originally intended to do exactly that? Go to Hawaii?

The pickup of drugs would be the most dangerous part. No one would want to spread it immensely in space nor in time. While I'm naysaying in context of smuggling, the boat is an amazing achievement.

What a cool project! Really enjoyed reading about the recovery. Crazy how well that thing held up.

I would assume the ocean would just shredd something so flimsy to pieces even with normal wave action, let alone a major storm. If you want something to survive 2-3 months in the ocean it needs to be quite sturdy.

OTOH the drug cartels probably have lots of money to invest. So if they need something sturdy they could probably hire a team to build that.

It's hard enough sometimes for normal companies to find the right resources. How many engineers are willing to work for cartels? Either they can do that by means of threat or fear, or finding the least ethically minded engineers that are looking for lots of money. I bet both cases are difficult to manage.

I think the cartels have already solved this problem in another area:

"Cartels have kidnapped technicians doing maintenance on cellular towers to make them fix their networks, people working in the sector said. The technicians usually are released after a few days, if not sooner."

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mexico-telecoms-cartels-s...

Not to mention the collision risk of something lurking just under the surface with no lights or a radar reflector.

Yea because that's what drug cartels care about. Package loss is part of the process.

That means having your capital tied up in in-transit drugs for two or three months. The cost of that may outweigh the savings from automation.

You also lose the ability to react quickly to market demand.

That approach might be suitable for established industries, but probably not for innovative, disruptive players in a winner-takes-all market like drug cartels.

Add to the fact that the cartels don't really care too much about their drug mules.

Every drug mule is a potential informant, and one more possible leak of the to/from information about the trade.

With an autonomous step in the chain, there is no human who knows where the craft is going to drive to. If anyone picks it out of the water it can be programmed to erase information about where it's headed towards.

The cartels likely already see these as "automated", given that, like you said, the mules are very low value to them. Maybe not automated, but definitely 'autonomous'.

> That means having your capital tied up in in-transit drugs for two or three months.

The cost of borrowing is at record lows across much of the world. I suspect it's the same in the criminal underworld too...

Pretty sure that with the funding available for this sort of projects this is already very much happening.

Check out this genius who's building this sort of stuff on his own: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zetRlliUO4

Almost surprising it hasn't happened yet.

If it was cheap enough they could send quite a few.

Who's to say it hasn't?

Surely for criminal enterprises exposure has a negative correlation to success. In other words, we are only getting to see the attempts that failed to be stealthy enough, there must be more impressive designs that we may never see... unless the assumption is that they eventually all get caught?

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