That's in Disney's "The Magic Highway" (1958), at 02:16. Which is apparently still shown at Disney parks in the waiting area for some auto-related attraction.
And there is something notoriously absent from the webpage, the fact it might be possible to tunnel underneath some headquarters and leave some explosives directly underneath to blow the enemy up, pun intended.
Asymmetric combatants, including in Vietnam and Gaza, have long used tunnels. I think they were popular in medieval siege warfare (is that right?).
I wonder why advanced militaries don't appear to use them: They have access to technology far superior to asymmetric groups and I would guess that allows much faster tunneling. Maybe it's almost always better ROI to do the same thing via the air - e.g., distribute supplies via airdrop.
> I think they were popular in medieval siege warfare (is that right?).
Yeah, in fact the term "undermine" comes from their use in siege warfare. Attackers would try to dig under enemy walls to collapse them (literally under-mining the walls), and the defenders would dig their own tunnels to try to collapse the attackers' tunnels.
It adds more things than I will ever learn how to do. But you still spend loooooots of time looking at a screen of 16x16 gray textures that are suggestive of rock.
OMG. I've always seen people doing surface navigation or at most surface digging in Minecraft. I never made the connection to possibly blasting away rocks while below surface.
Loot gets better and rarer the deeper you go. It’s a basic slot machine. You spend 5 minutes on whack whack whack whack poof, and every once in a while … Diamond Jackpot!
“The name was a combination of the words mine, for mining ore in shafts, and craft, as in building or creating something.” Quote from here: https://www.wired.com/2013/11/minecraft-book/
Tunneling to undermine walls probably began in the Bronze Age and it was used to breach trenches in WWI. It has apparently alway been awful work. I’ve read that some premodern walled cities sunk metal bars in pits below walls to try and find where enemies were digging.
> I wonder why advanced militaries don't appear to use them
In cities they can use pre-formed tunnels - subways. Otherwise they aren’t needed because enemies don’t tend to sit in large static artillery-proof castles
Don't appear to use them because they're hidden. It's fairly common with drug smuggling I believe as well. And from what I remember there were tunnels from Palestine to Israel.
It's why Elon has said roughly that if you can detect tunnels being dug you should contact the military because you'll become rich; he said this at least once in reference to concerns that people in cities would feel The Boring Company tunnels being bored underneath their city - that you can't feel/notice it; obviously when breaching the surface you will.
I've honestly wondered at times if industrious nations - who are arguably in contention with the ways of freedom and democracy - may be digging towards other continents, even if at current technology it would take 40+ years to make the journey. If you can all of a sudden deploy millions to 10s of millions of operatives and/or soldiers - even if it's a long journey, perhaps each with significant Bitcoin or perhaps cash in the currency of who you're invading, you might be able to very quickly takeover a large nation; or get a foothold, and arguably why the right to bear arms is additionally important - for domestic bad actors but foreign bad actors could in this scenario now be local.
I've read stories for years about people having problems with vibrations from tunneling. One was a music studio in Brooklyn, IIRC, which went out of business because of boring for a new water tunnel.
> I wonder why advanced militaries don't appear to use them:
Because modern advanced militaries don't usually have the problems that are solved by tunneling, either for pre-modern militaries (static fortifications highly resistant to direct attack by the most powerful weapons available) or modern less-advanced ones fighting asymmetrical warfare (covert movement against an enemy that controls the air.)
That's disappointing, isn't this a legitimately good idea? Judging from the current Russian invasion into Ukraine, a tunnel into Mariupol to deliver supplies would have been useful, not to mention the defensive usefulness of underground bunkers throughout Ukraine which have shielded civilians.
Expect that undetectable improvise explosives would make Ukraine much less conquerable. A big enough pipe to pump in a bunch of ANFO under a road should be sufficient to take out a tank.
I think an underground airbase is much cheaper than a destroyed airbase. The situation in Ukraine showed how unprotected airplanes sitting on the ground are.
Underground airbases can still be destroyed. You just have to attack the entry and exit points. There are also specific munitions you could use. You could even fly a cruise missile through whichever entry is used for planes to leave.
Sure, but once they're destroyed, you're irretrievably fucked and so is everything that was inside. You can endure a fair level of damage on a regular airbase.
Technically, many planes could been used as ICBMs, from silo.
For example, F-35 have needed capabilities. Other notable examples - Harrier and its relatives.
Basically, all modern fighter jets are capable to start from catapult, some need additional gunpowder accelerators (also possible to use as brake).
Landing is harder, for it need big enough runway, or some sort of aircraft carrier flight deck, or plane capable of vertical landing (some F-35 modifications are capable).
An ICBM is typically at 2m in diameter. The F35B has a length of 15m. You will need even more margin due to vortices. This proposal is unfeasible. You will not be able to have a silo for each airplane. If you don't, it's again easier to destroy and impossible to rebuild.
1. Diameter of silo is much larger than diameter of ICBM, if used start from silo, because part of diameter used for exhaust.
Only first ICBMs, use lift, so rocket lifted to surface, and practically started from platform on surface, not from silo.
2. Plane could also use lift. And many planes used on carriers, have folding wings, and they usually moving from storage to flight deck with folded wings, and unfold wings just before acceleration.
Also plane does not need to move via vertical tube horizontally, it could been tied to some platform and turn to have smallest possible cross section.
- Civil planes may be not strong enough for such maneuvers, but all navy fighters all perfectly fitted for this.
I know that the silo has to be greater than the diameter of the object holding them. This is much more true for an airplane than for a missile.
I know that planes have folding wings. The issue is the length, not the wingspan. That's why I quoted the length of the plane. None of those planes have folding nosecones.
I am considering vertical takeoff. The maneuver you are suggesting would not work, because the airplane would stall unless you accelerated it to over 300km/h. To do this in an aircraft carrier, without having to worry about gravity, is already hard enough that you either need massive steam boilers or an extremely expensive EMALS system.
These catapults cost around 800 million dollars, by the way. Accelerating a 30 ton object to hundreds of kilometers an hour in slightly more than a second is extremely expensive.
If you were to do it any slower, you'd need your silo to be over a hundred meters deep.
Then you have the issue of trying to prevent the airplane from crashing as its wings are unfolding. Without thrust vectoring, vertically, almost at stall speeds, there is little chance the tail will be able to handle the task.
I'm sure now, you have not seen those drawings, what military planned to do with silo infrastructure.
They planned to make constantly working build system, so would be tens more silo's than real ICBMs, and they planned to constantly move ICBMs, so nobody will know, in which silo now exists ICBM, and which is empty, and they planned to build silo's from underground, so they will open just before ICBM launch.
This article claims they have designed their own machine.
“unlike traditional tunnel boring machines (TBM), Prufrock is custom designed by The Boring Company, and it is expected to be capable of digging far quicker than its conventional counterparts.”
Digging around the net there’s not much on the prufrock. Loads of “tech news” sites repeating tweets or PR puff pieces but no concrete info on what prufrock is doing.
Generally if someone is well-known for keeping secrets then they are doing something incorrectly. It’s not the website that is employed but rather users of the website, and they also use gasp other websites and do awfully mundane things as well. When you open your mind you’ll find the kind you believed was ill-defined simply was the spider viewed from the fly.
I recently saw a new meme that was posted on Reddit, and then a day later posted to 4chan as if it was new. They may be brokers rather than originators.
(Assuming, of course, that three-letter agencies haven't already been using this technology to honeycomb the country with networks of secret tunnels for decades...)
I am glad we are getting this capability now, who knows when ISIS and the Taliban will have enriched uranium to the point where they have subsurface ships prowling the depths of our planet, attacking our freedoms from below.
[1] Responsible for the most recent set of trends, but derivative of creepypasta that's been gathering traction for a while. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/the-backrooms - points to 2018, but I'm pretty sure that SCP wiki had versions before then.
From googling around, most rock melts at around 1000C, so I guess the biggest challenge is making a reactor that will survive heating up to 1000C? The melting point of uranium is barely 1100C, so seems like an awful thin margin.
How would they handle not irradiating (and generating all sorts of isotopes in) the tunnel walls? A 10MW reactor generates a fuckton of radiation.
Nobody could come anywhere near the "melting" head, even after shutdown.
Wouldn't hitting even a tiny amount of water would be catastrophically bad, causing a steam explosion? Hitting oil deposits, coal...minerals that contain water...
The melting point of uranium metal may be around there, but these reactors would use a much higher temperature fuel form, such as the everyday uranium oxide (UO₂) used in nearly all commercial reactors, which melts around 2900°C. Usually it's the coolant and structural materials that limit temperature in nuclear reactors. These could use exotic materials like SiC for structure. Interesting that they use liquid metal heat pipes in this study to transfer the heat to the rock melting surfaces.
Not a Nuclear Mechanical Engineer, but I bet you could concentrate the heat of the reactors using a giant nuclear-grade heat pump to concentrate heat well above the point-temperature of the reactor itself. As long as the fuel is generating X Watts of power, you can theoretically concentrate that energy away and down to smaller and smaller areas, increasing temperature as you go.
We should probably ask someone who took a heat transfer or other undergrad physics class, but from my basic understanding of the physics, "concentrating heat" isn't really a thing - at the very least, you'd need to extract the energy from a heat differential into some other form to do this.
I did read a while ago that a war on on mainland china would be expected to be fought largely underground. This is due to unstoppable, cheap drones and loitering munitions on both sides basically making the surface unusable for combat.
The exaggeration is great in this one. Drones are hardly "unstoppable" for an advanced military like the one US has. Cheap ones require radio links and can be jammed. More expensive ones communicating via satellites aren't cheap. Autonomous are either pipe dream or basically bad cruise missiles. That's not even considering advances in radar (utilising microdoppler effects), IR (drones are hot), and various effectors (lasers and cheap auto cannons).
> Autonomous are either pipe dream or basically bad cruise missiles.
Loitering munitions are already capable for much more than a “bad cruise missile”.
I wouldn’t dismiss autonomous drones that easily. The trick is that they don’t have to be perfect, just probabilistically good enough for them to be worth their cost.
What are loitering munitions capable of against a foe that can jam and shoot them, outside of sleek promotional videos? American army made IEDs much less effective through jamming, and they need basically one bit of info transmitted, what makes you think that having a bidirectional data link with enough bandwidth for video is going to be feasible?
> what makes you think that having a bidirectional data link with enough bandwidth for video is going to be feasible?
We were discussing autonomy. Which part of my comment gave you the impression that I think there will be a video link?
> What are loitering munitions capable of against a foe that can jam and shoot them, outside of sleek promotional videos?
Homing on radiation is an obvious first answer. There are many more ideas I have. They each fit into the computational budget of an oldish smart phone, therefore I assume it would be possible to integrate them on a drone. Possibly most of these ideas are bad, but the armies of the world are paying smart people to think of good ones. It would be foolish to dismiss the whole category as "pipe dream or basically bad cruise missiles". But of course you think what you want to think.
It wasn't clear that you mean only autonomous and not loitering in general.
If you mean autonomous loitering munitions, they are are basically short lived mines in the sky. We had those in the sea for more than a century, they didn't render seas unsurvivable for ships. And if you think loitering munitions are cheap vs their targets, wait till you hear about inflatable heated "tanks" that such a munition won't be able to distinguish from an actual tank.
Indeed, armies are paying smart people to think about those issues. You can notice that those smart people don't plan to get rid of ground armies, instead they build jammers, lasers, and automatic guns. The original claim was about ground war being impossible anymore because of drones, which doesn't really match up with what those smart army people are doing.
Its about cost difference. The primary way to engage a small drone (sUAS) is with a missile costing $60k+ which has limited inventory. To shoot down a drone that costs $400. Its not hard to see how quickly that gets out of hand.
Try talking to the soldiers who have been in hot zones in the last 5 years. Guarantee they will tell you just how hard it is to shoot them down.
> The primary way to engage a small drone (sUAS) is with a missile
That's just not true. Rheinmetal has their Skynex, everyone and their dog does lasers, and jamming is basically free. Phalanx (and its land equivalent) is also a thing, updating their targeting doesn't seem insurmountable.
I'm not aware of any "hot zones" lately where a war was even close to being decided by drones, much less everyone being forced underground. Even in Ukraine with absolutely hapless Russian army drone ops are mostly harassment. For an advanced army drones just aren't that big of a deal really, there are plenty of detection, disablement, and destruction modalities available.
> I did read a while ago that a war on on mainland china would be expected to be fought largely underground.
I assume they mean it will be fought between two dudes in an underground bunker for the last can of food. It is hard to imagine how an outside attack against mainland China could lead to anything but nuclear escalation.
Concept art suggest tunnels networks a few inches wide, not for moving bodies but for resupply in urban environments. Looks like horizontal directional drilling rigs for wells, which takes weeks.
Tunnelling during WWI is described evocatively in Sebastian Faulk's novel "Birdsong". Evidently this generated a TV programme (https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2012/jan/22/birdson... although I've not seen that, I can report that the novel is heart-stunning.
I worked on a similar top secret rapid tunnel project at Raytheon (I did not have a clearance and did not learn any classified info). The tunnel boring was miserably slow and it was unspoken knowledge around the office that the whole thing was just a jobs program and it was never going to work.
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[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 181 ms ] threadI'm not certain about how military strategy is improving with technology.
[1] https://youtu.be/6-S1ni5aFAw
There are several other patents on these from the 60s as well:
https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/qlfc6r/til_i...
I wonder why advanced militaries don't appear to use them: They have access to technology far superior to asymmetric groups and I would guess that allows much faster tunneling. Maybe it's almost always better ROI to do the same thing via the air - e.g., distribute supplies via airdrop.
Yeah, in fact the term "undermine" comes from their use in siege warfare. Attackers would try to dig under enemy walls to collapse them (literally under-mining the walls), and the defenders would dig their own tunnels to try to collapse the attackers' tunnels.
Wait, does the word 'boring' come from the drugdery of digging tunnels?
It adds more things than I will ever learn how to do. But you still spend loooooots of time looking at a screen of 16x16 gray textures that are suggestive of rock.
“The name was a combination of the words mine, for mining ore in shafts, and craft, as in building or creating something.” Quote from here: https://www.wired.com/2013/11/minecraft-book/
https://dosgames.com/game/tunneler/
Try it out with a physically proximal friend.
* I even made a basic Tank Wars clone from scratch in one day because of a bet with one of the other guys.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petard
And more recently:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mines_in_the_Battle_of_Messine...
In cities they can use pre-formed tunnels - subways. Otherwise they aren’t needed because enemies don’t tend to sit in large static artillery-proof castles
It's why Elon has said roughly that if you can detect tunnels being dug you should contact the military because you'll become rich; he said this at least once in reference to concerns that people in cities would feel The Boring Company tunnels being bored underneath their city - that you can't feel/notice it; obviously when breaching the surface you will.
I've honestly wondered at times if industrious nations - who are arguably in contention with the ways of freedom and democracy - may be digging towards other continents, even if at current technology it would take 40+ years to make the journey. If you can all of a sudden deploy millions to 10s of millions of operatives and/or soldiers - even if it's a long journey, perhaps each with significant Bitcoin or perhaps cash in the currency of who you're invading, you might be able to very quickly takeover a large nation; or get a foothold, and arguably why the right to bear arms is additionally important - for domestic bad actors but foreign bad actors could in this scenario now be local.
I've read stories for years about people having problems with vibrations from tunneling. One was a music studio in Brooklyn, IIRC, which went out of business because of boring for a new water tunnel.
Because modern advanced militaries don't usually have the problems that are solved by tunneling, either for pre-modern militaries (static fortifications highly resistant to direct attack by the most powerful weapons available) or modern less-advanced ones fighting asymmetrical warfare (covert movement against an enemy that controls the air.)
"May 29, 2020"
https://www.ge.com/news/reports/dig-this-ge-engineers-learne...
https://web.archive.org/web/20200808234935/https://www.ge.co...
They are extremely expensive, but large networks seem nearly impossible to destroy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_Great_Wall_of_Chin...
For example, F-35 have needed capabilities. Other notable examples - Harrier and its relatives.
Basically, all modern fighter jets are capable to start from catapult, some need additional gunpowder accelerators (also possible to use as brake).
Landing is harder, for it need big enough runway, or some sort of aircraft carrier flight deck, or plane capable of vertical landing (some F-35 modifications are capable).
Yes and no.
1. Diameter of silo is much larger than diameter of ICBM, if used start from silo, because part of diameter used for exhaust. Only first ICBMs, use lift, so rocket lifted to surface, and practically started from platform on surface, not from silo.
2. Plane could also use lift. And many planes used on carriers, have folding wings, and they usually moving from storage to flight deck with folded wings, and unfold wings just before acceleration. Also plane does not need to move via vertical tube horizontally, it could been tied to some platform and turn to have smallest possible cross section. - Civil planes may be not strong enough for such maneuvers, but all navy fighters all perfectly fitted for this.
I know that planes have folding wings. The issue is the length, not the wingspan. That's why I quoted the length of the plane. None of those planes have folding nosecones.
I am considering vertical takeoff. The maneuver you are suggesting would not work, because the airplane would stall unless you accelerated it to over 300km/h. To do this in an aircraft carrier, without having to worry about gravity, is already hard enough that you either need massive steam boilers or an extremely expensive EMALS system.
These catapults cost around 800 million dollars, by the way. Accelerating a 30 ton object to hundreds of kilometers an hour in slightly more than a second is extremely expensive.
If you were to do it any slower, you'd need your silo to be over a hundred meters deep.
Then you have the issue of trying to prevent the airplane from crashing as its wings are unfolding. Without thrust vectoring, vertically, almost at stall speeds, there is little chance the tail will be able to handle the task.
They planned to make constantly working build system, so would be tens more silo's than real ICBMs, and they planned to constantly move ICBMs, so nobody will know, in which silo now exists ICBM, and which is empty, and they planned to build silo's from underground, so they will open just before ICBM launch.
https://travelblogeurope.com/deep-inside-cold-war-aircraft-h...
Even considering, it is possible to destroy Carrier, it is constantly moving, so exact place unknown and it is extremely hard to destroy it.
But to be more strict, Carriers are not travel alone, they all time accompanied by few tens other ships.
We in Ukraine constantly invite Carriers to Lviv sea port.
Sure, for our case, should talk about underground Carrier.
“unlike traditional tunnel boring machines (TBM), Prufrock is custom designed by The Boring Company, and it is expected to be capable of digging far quicker than its conventional counterparts.”
https://www.teslarati.com/elon-musk-boring-company-prufrock-...
Even their website is scarce of info.
https://pixar.fandom.com/wiki/The_Underminer
https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/J4cAAOSwDPtf1EcM/s-l300.jpg
(Assuming, of course, that three-letter agencies haven't already been using this technology to honeycomb the country with networks of secret tunnels for decades...)
[1] Responsible for the most recent set of trends, but derivative of creepypasta that's been gathering traction for a while. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/the-backrooms - points to 2018, but I'm pretty sure that SCP wiki had versions before then.
How would they handle not irradiating (and generating all sorts of isotopes in) the tunnel walls? A 10MW reactor generates a fuckton of radiation.
Nobody could come anywhere near the "melting" head, even after shutdown.
Wouldn't hitting even a tiny amount of water would be catastrophically bad, causing a steam explosion? Hitting oil deposits, coal...minerals that contain water...
Loitering munitions are already capable for much more than a “bad cruise missile”.
I wouldn’t dismiss autonomous drones that easily. The trick is that they don’t have to be perfect, just probabilistically good enough for them to be worth their cost.
We were discussing autonomy. Which part of my comment gave you the impression that I think there will be a video link?
> What are loitering munitions capable of against a foe that can jam and shoot them, outside of sleek promotional videos?
Homing on radiation is an obvious first answer. There are many more ideas I have. They each fit into the computational budget of an oldish smart phone, therefore I assume it would be possible to integrate them on a drone. Possibly most of these ideas are bad, but the armies of the world are paying smart people to think of good ones. It would be foolish to dismiss the whole category as "pipe dream or basically bad cruise missiles". But of course you think what you want to think.
If you mean autonomous loitering munitions, they are are basically short lived mines in the sky. We had those in the sea for more than a century, they didn't render seas unsurvivable for ships. And if you think loitering munitions are cheap vs their targets, wait till you hear about inflatable heated "tanks" that such a munition won't be able to distinguish from an actual tank.
Indeed, armies are paying smart people to think about those issues. You can notice that those smart people don't plan to get rid of ground armies, instead they build jammers, lasers, and automatic guns. The original claim was about ground war being impossible anymore because of drones, which doesn't really match up with what those smart army people are doing.
That's just not true. Rheinmetal has their Skynex, everyone and their dog does lasers, and jamming is basically free. Phalanx (and its land equivalent) is also a thing, updating their targeting doesn't seem insurmountable.
I'm not aware of any "hot zones" lately where a war was even close to being decided by drones, much less everyone being forced underground. Even in Ukraine with absolutely hapless Russian army drone ops are mostly harassment. For an advanced army drones just aren't that big of a deal really, there are plenty of detection, disablement, and destruction modalities available.
I assume they mean it will be fought between two dudes in an underground bunker for the last can of food. It is hard to imagine how an outside attack against mainland China could lead to anything but nuclear escalation.
Concept art suggest tunnels networks a few inches wide, not for moving bodies but for resupply in urban environments. Looks like horizontal directional drilling rigs for wells, which takes weeks.
Abandoned mine shaft, subway systems, unused service routes, and deserted mine shafts
Many have no known purpose at all.