4 hours ago by willvarfar
(Webjanitor) sorry the site is slow to load, Iām actually amazed itās holding up at all considering how itās really not dimensioned to! It is a one core vm with no ram and Mb throttle: itās normally doing a few dozen visitors a minute, kinda thing.
Thereās loads more super interesting tech posts on this blog, so do bookmark and visit later when itās quieter :)
12 minutes ago by chordalkeyboard
His book is also worth a purchase.
5 hours ago by csense
Military subs have a lot high-tech stealth tech (much of it classified) to hide their electronic signals, engine noise, and so on.
How do these vessels routinely get through, and they have very little stealth tech? If the Spanish / NATO / US military ignores them or can't see them, doesn't that mean actual (enemy) Chinese / Iranian / Russian subs can get away with a lot by pretending to be simple drug smuggling boats?
Maybe the military lets drug smugglers operate, and even ignores foreign governments doing submarine subterfuge like bugging undersea cables or dropping spies / equipment onto shores at night? The purpose of turning a blind eye to be protecting information about anti-sub capabilities, if the drug kingpins or enemy spymasters don't know which of their missions successfully maintained secrecy? Maybe when the anti-sub network alerts successfully, they watch the spies and equipment that lands from a distance with high-tech drones / satellites (or heck, a simple patrol squad with night vision binoculars), follow them for a few months, then tip off the cops (if it's a mere drug cartel) or send counterintelligence to arrest them (in case of actual spies). So the enemy has to guess whether they got seen on the submarine landing, or were compromised by some other means.
That these boats can get through might be a catastrophic failure of anti-sub tech, or it might be part of the normal I-know-you-know game of international espionage. I suppose we civilians wouldn't be able to tell the difference. Perhaps the biggest clue is that drug subs have been a thing for many years, but there's a notable lack of public alarm from military / politicians over it. Given that, I'd put my money on the hypothesis that the military knows exactly what the smugglers are up to, but chooses to ignore it to keep anti-sub capabilities and weaknesses secret.
4 hours ago by overlordalex
Drug smuggling submarines are much closer to pre-world-war-2 submarines than the nuclear military submarines you may be thinking of.
These submarines are essentially boats that sit with almost all of their profile under water, and often may not even be able to submerge at all.
Their purpose is to reduce the visible portion of the boat above the water to the absolute minimum. A small swell is enough to hide these submarines from view.
Noone is especially looking for these as they sound and travel like typical boats
2 hours ago by jameshart
But surely if you want to just look and sound like an ordinary boat, you donāt need to run partially submerged with waves over your deck and a low profile hull - you could just... use an ordinary boat?
2 hours ago by lazide
A small boat of the size most governments are going to ignore struggle to move tons of drugs, or carry more than 1-2 people. Which is what these subs are doing.
2 hours ago by jki275
reduces radar signature. The higher you stick up out of the water, the further away you can be detected by surface radar.
4 hours ago by sudosysgen
Submarines are inherently quite stealthy.
Military submarines need all that tech to be able to hide from active surveillance - I assume no one is staging ASW operations against Narco submarines.
And yes, Chinese/Russian subs can get away with a ton as long as they don't get detected.
4 hours ago by csense
> I assume no one is staging ASW operations against Narco submarines.
Subs on covert missions don't exactly fly flags. I find it hard to believe there's anti-sub tech that can tell if a given vessel is being operated by cartel members or the Russian navy.
Well, yes, if it's a high-tech vessel then it's obviously some nation-state. But if you know your enemy always goes after high-tech subs and ignores low-tech subs, Russia can simply build a fleet of low-tech subs and use them, knowing the NATO commander on duty will take a glance at the sonar readout and say "Ahh it's those drug smugglers again, law enforcement's business, not our problem, we do nothing, boys."
Point is, they should be doing ASW operations against the Narcos, if they can't tell without boarding the sub whether it's the Narcos or the Russians.
While it's probably impossible for the Narcos to build a Russian-looking sub, I'm sure it'd be pretty easy for the Russians to build a Narco-looking sub. And the Russians have quite an incentive to do so if, as you assert, "nobody's staging ASW operations against Narco submarines."
an hour ago by ethbr0
> I find it hard to believe there's anti-sub tech that can tell if a given vessel is being operated by cartel members or the Russian navy.
Passive sonar could trivially differentiate between military and civilian engines in the 1980s. And within those, often fingerprint individual vessels by their machinery quirks / lack of maintenance.
And that was without heavy computer pre-processing.
The more cogent point is: why would navies care?
30' length x 10' beam
Modern diesel / AIP examples are in the 200' x 20' range?
There isn't enough room to put credible military capability on a vessel this size. And if you're going low cost, then you want to go fully UUV and elimate crew spaces and logistics altogether.
3 hours ago by mandevil
Errr, this is very different, but not because of the submarine.
Modern ASW[1] is based on the idea that Russian subs come from Russian bases. US and NATO submarines (and airplanes and ships and undersea sonar arrays etc.) pay a lot of attention to those bases. They are constantly looking for anything coming out of those bases, and then they can follow and track them across the ocean. But saying "somewhere in the Atlantic ocean there is a submarine, let's go find it" is not how modern ASW works. Think of it like looking through a telescope- in order to see something you have to shrink your field of view a lot, but when you narrow your field of view you can look pretty clearly at that one spot. The trick is cuing to point the telescope at the right spot. That's where the difference between a Navy and drug smuggling organization becomes clear.
Drug smuggling submarines are, at least as far as I am aware, generally built in situ on random uninhabited spots, by small groups over the course of a few weeks, then sail to another random spot to deliver their cargo (in Latin America they tend to build on the coast, in Europe they tend to build inland and then truck to the coast). They try to avoid busy shipping lanes or other high traffic areas, try to avoid sending messages via radio or anything like that. The whole point is that there is nothing to cue anyone. That's why drug smuggling submarines are different from real navy submarines. Real navies need facilities that appear to satellites, they need training time which can be observed, they need coordination between ships which means communications, etc. Real navies have to deal with their sailors revealing their locations on VK or Strava. Drug smugglers organize their lives so they don't leave any of that. And when they do slip up and someone can cue the police, the coast guard, or the navy, the submarine gets found just like a real navy submarine does.
[1]: With the very important caveat that over the last 30 years the USN has allowed it's ASW capabilities to atrophy, due to the atrophy of the USSR/RU submarine fleet. But, to look at what they did back when they cared about ASW google: GUIK Gap, SOSUS, SURTASS, Classic Wizard. Those were all about getting ASW assets close to Soviet submarines, and then letting them go to work.
4 hours ago by sudosysgen
ASW is highly targeted, there is no way to try to detect submarines over long distances. So unless they want to spend millions and millions targetting exactly these submarines it won't work.
4 hours ago by maxerickson
Wouldn't inference based on what they are doing and where they are doing it be pretty useful? Like overwhelmingly so?
4 hours ago by BLKNSLVR
I very much admire the irony of the ultimate conclusion of the long I-know-you-know game: Pure observation; non-interventionalism.
Inability to act for fear of losing the value of the method of information gathering that provided the requirement to make the decision to act or not.
International espionage revealed as nihilism.
4 hours ago by maxerickson
In WW2, the US would send spotter planes out into the Pacific where they knew Japanese boats were, wait for them to report that they had been spotted, and then attack.
So inaction isn't inevitable, it's a choice.
an hour ago by perl4ever
aka "parallel construction"
3 hours ago by lain-dono
What about narcos working as spies?
What about counterspy? What if one of them decides to make a little extra money running drugs?
We need to go deeper. We can only fantasize about schemes that may never be revealed.
2 hours ago by f430
what if they purposefully allow narco economies to thrive because of its destabilizing effects? Imagine if US had to suddenly worry about a powerful South American military/economic coalition, it simply wouldn't be able to focus on other parts of the world.
2 hours ago by supernova87a
Well, to be accurate, these vessels are usually not fully submersible / true submarines. That would require a level of engineering and cost that is probably not worth it for smugglers.
These are semi-submersed "snorkeling" vessels that breath surface air and ride just under the water, which makes it much simpler to design/build + operate.
The real goal is to get most of the ship off the surface where it can be easily detected. Semi-submersible is good enough for that purpose.
I'm guessing various countries' navies (underwater sound detection) probably can detect these vessels with some accuracy if they wanted to, they just don't have the resources/time to go after them as their top priority.
5 hours ago by mastazi
Archive link in case original page is not loading for you:
https://web.archive.org/web/20210314215410/http://www.hisutt...
(This website currently has 2 articles on the HN home page and is being hit hard)
6 hours ago by rhokstar
I briefly thought that the Narco sub was of Latin America origins and made its way to Europe. That would've been a wild story!
5 hours ago by solarexplorer
This did happen a year ago https://elpais.com/politica/2019/12/13/actualidad/1576232797...
5 hours ago by suifbwish
Why does it look like that site was built just for that one article?
3 hours ago by soneil
Because it's actually 99% content? It's a slightly jarring look when you're used to "I know you're trying to read this, but here's 10 more articles that look better on our engagement rates than simply scrolling".
It's a major newspaper in Spain. First or second in the country depending on whether you're counting by online or print readership. It doesn't exist just for one article.
(Although with a little clicking around, it does appear most articles have a sidebar, and this one doesn't. No idea there.)
an hour ago by vlz
This article from the same site has pictures and also a cutaway of a transatlantic sub.
an hour ago by marktolson
I'm no boat designer but this seems like such an inefficient hull design. This is supposed to ride low which makes it a displacement hull but the transom / stern would create a huge low pressure area behind the boat hence a very high drag coefficient. Is there something I am missing here?
26 minutes ago by fsckboy
i'm no boat designer either, but I think what they've done is taken a normal boat and converted it, reducing the number of problems they need to solve?
11 minutes ago by marktolson
Which I get, but why not choose a displacement hull that's designed to ride through the water as opposed to the over it? Even fewer problems to solve. They could use a smaller, quieter engine with no stern drive I/O leg needed (more reliable, less moving parts etc). My only theory is that these boats may be designed to plane (once the ballast has been dumped) to get away from threats at higher speeds.
2 hours ago by slimsag
The exhaust pipes on this don't look very lengthy, maybe 3 feet max - I imagine this would introduce some challenges keeping the engine running, or require some fairly precise depth control to avoid water getting in the exhaust?
5 hours ago by pvaldes
The article don't mention that is the first known narcosub that was being build directly in Europe. Is a further step in this arms race.
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