American defense technology company Anduril has rolled out its Copperhead-M – an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) that provides uncrewed subs with the punch of a smart torpedo carrying up to 500 lb (227 kg) of high explosives.
If the submarine is the shark of the world’s navies, the torpedo is its teeth. Though a modern sub can carry an array of weapons up to and including nuclear weapons capable of obliterating a city, it’s the torpedo that is the most feared because of its ability to stealthily destroy ships and even other submarines.
If, like me, you’ve watched way too many old submarine movies, it’s easy to think that torpedoes are still the “tin fish” that were used by the major powers from the 1930s until well into the 1980s. Though there were many variants, most submarine torpedoes were similar to the US Mark 14 and the British Mark 8 – steam-driven devices carrying up to 805 lb (365 kg) of high explosives.
Anduril
The result of decades of intense development, their operation was very simple; find a target, point the submarine at it or where it will be in a few minutes, do the whole “Fire one! Fire two!” dramatic bit, and send a fan of torpedoes in hopes that at least one will break the enemy ship’s keel and send it to the bottom.
Today, torpedoes are as sophisticated as the attack submarines that carry them. They are much faster at up to 80 knots (92 mph, 148 km/h) compared to their forebears’ 55 knots (63 mph, 102 km/h), have ranges of up to 30 nautical miles (34.5 miles, 56 km) instead of under 9,000 yards, pack a much more destructive explosive punch, have sophisticated homing devices to lock onto and engage fleeing targets, and can be controlled by the mother submarine by a trailing digital wire.
Now all this is fine if you’re a US Virginia class or UK Astute class attack submarine, but if you’re one of the coming generation of autonomous submarines, you’re up the proverbial without a paddle. That’s because these super sophisticated fish are too large, too expensive, and too slow to be manufactured to be wasted on small robotic vehicles.
Anduril
Anduril’s answer is a new class of torpedoes specifically engineered for use on AUVs like the company’s Dive-LD and Dive-XL. Called the Copperhead, it comes in two variants, the Copperhead and Copperhead-M, which both come in two models, the Copperhead-100 and the Copperhead-500.
Both variants have a modular design that allows them to be customized to suit particular missions and, as the model names suggest, they come in two sizes, each of which can travel at speeds of over 30 knots (34 mph, 55 km/h). With a length of 2.7 m (8.9 ft) and a diameter of 324 mm (12.75 in), the Copperhead-100 has a payload capacity of 100 lb (45 kg). Meanwhile, the Copperhead-500 is 4 m (13.1 ft) long and 533 mm (21 in) wide but carries 500 lb (227 kg) of cargo.
These modular craft can be modified by fitting them out with all sorts of sensors, including sonar, magnetometers, and chemical detectors. They are also designed to be carried by Anduril’s Dive-LD and Dive-XL. However, for the Copperhead-M variants, these models can swap out their sensors for warheads. The result: AUVs toting honest-to-Fulton torpedoes, with the Dive-XL capable of carrying dozens of Copperhead-100Ms and multiple Copperhead-500Ms.
Anduril
According to the company, the Copperhead-M isn’t just a way to give uncrewed submarines their own tin fish or to make robotic boats more able to go into harm’s way instead of humans. The idea is that combining cheap-to-make AUVs with their own heavy armaments that are equally cheap and linking them with an intelligent sonar network would create fleets of robotic subs able to engage enemy ships and submarines in numbers never before seen.
In other words, autonomous submarine swarms.
If this technology proves successful, we may one day see a fundamental transformation of submarine warfare, with crewed submarines keeping to the rear of the action to act as command centers and special ops platforms while far more numerous packs of autonomous boats equipped with small, smart torpedoes can deny whole sections of the oceans like mobile, aggressive minefields able to shift position and hunt down targets.
That would be enough to give even Captain Nemo conniption fits.
Source: Anduril