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Comment by enko | Hacker News Reader

My idea for when I became an evil criminal mastermind was always to use a kind of computer controller drogue which would attach to the bottom of cargo ships:

- construct a buoyancy-controllable drogue which would magnetically attach to a cargo ship, then hang behind and below it during transit

- load up the pseudoephedrine, or whatever, in (say) shanghai or during a stop somewhere near a supplier

- wait until the ship came near the US, then release the drogue offshore and pick it up with a boat

Seems almost foolproof, although I'd imagine marine capable technology is harder than my web developer's brain is envisaging, and you'd be betting lots of money that your little parasite didn't fall off.

I'm probably overthinking this, however, and you'd just pay someone onboard to keep some suitcases in their cabin, or something.

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You are missing the fuel -- it takes a lot of fuel to drag that parasite across the ocean and it would almost certainly be noticed by the crew of the ship as shipping is a low margin, high volume business and costs are closely watched.

If that parasite is designed slightly aerodynamic (with a total volume of lets say 5-10 tons) and you have a vessel with 100k+ GT, i dont think that the difference in fuel costs will be noticable - the difference due to tide/winds etc. will be much bigger.

Aerodynamics are good. Hydrodynamics are more appropriate.

There's a novel I read years ago that had a similar idea. It was a Clive Cussler book: The Mediterranean Caper. The smuggling plot had a modified submarine containing the narcotics attached to cargo vessels & it would detach from the cargo vessel at inspection times. It wasn't a great book and it felt kind of James Bond villain-esque but the concept is sound.

The platform you seek is the seaglider [1]. It is highly efficient and doesn't come with the risk of operating in well known shipping lanes.

[1] http://www.apl.washington.edu/projects/seaglider/summary.htm...

Probably not a bad idea, although you might be even more successful if your attachment unit just spot welded itself to the ship. (of course that leaves traces but it requires no energy to keep attached).

The sea gliders are interesting (see Liquid Robotics) but they have limited cargo capacity. 15,000 lbs would be like 5,000 sea gliders, that is a big foot print.

The game will of course really change when the human operators step out. Most drug cartels seem unwilling to risk their load to robotic pilots but at some point that will change. In a submersible you could gain a tremendous advantage if you didn't care how 'deep' you went relative to the Coast Guard.

Once we get electro-stimulus drugs this will become moot of course but in the mean time it makes for some interesting engineering challenges.

http://battlefieldamerica.wordpress.com/2011/02/28/ice-dive-...

You miss the point. The poor SOB ship won't even know it. It would be a submarine that attaches itself in Japan to a ship known to head to the US. Or mid-rout. And that's that. In the US, we have a small ship waiting for the cargo sending a signal to wake it up and detach.

The beauty of current AI is that the compartment can be set to notice divers nearby and "walk" to the other side of the hull. Since sonar can't pick up small attached objects, boom you got yourself the equivalent of a smuggling bed bug. The crew can be all detained while this happens because they are not in on it.

The only issue would be noise made if you have listener crews. That one would be tough to solve. That's why you attach yourself to large boats, not to small smuggle ships.

Powering an electromagnetic for that kind of voyage on an amateur drug-smuggler's budget is one possible pain point I can think of. It would have to be a pretty strong magnet, as well.

It wouldn't be an electromagnet. It would be some strong permanent magnets with an attachment/detachment mechanism, like an inflatable interstitial bladder or spacer jacks. The key would be to let the magnet connect and disconnect slowly, controllably and quietly. It's quite doable, AFAIK (not a magnetic limpet engineer!).

As for power, why not a turbine powered generator? The host ship won't miss the few tens of watts extra drag.

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