Interesting 400 MPH VTOL Variant

Under development at DARPA:

Story here.

Hunting Diesel Subs

From the UK Daily Mail:

The US Navy is set to unleash an army of 'ghost drones' to scour the coasts for enemy submarines. They hope to end the growing threat of quiet, diesel powered enemy submarines enters American waters undetected.

The robot boats will go to sea for us to three months at a time.

The project began in 2010, when the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, announced that they were building a 132-foot autonomous boat to track quiet, diesel-powered submarines.

The program was dubbed Anti-submarine Warfare Continuous Trail Unmanned Vessel, or ACTUV.

In six weeks of tests along a 35-nautical mile stretch of water off of Mississippi earlier this year, testers at engineering company Leidos and DARPA put the ACTUV's systems through 100 different scenarios.

The test boat was able to tail a target boat at 1 kilometer's distance, something military bosses say is a major step forward.

More at DARPA and here.

I wonder how easy it is to detect and destroy these 'ghost drones'? Are they capable of evasion or self defense? It sounds like the technology is not mature and will take a bit more development before it is truly mission capable.