- US military contractor Anduril has signed a US$100 million contract with the Australian Navy, to design and deliver three iterations of an Extra Large Autonomous Undersea Vehicle (XL-AUV).
- And to keep costs low and timelines to a tight three years for all three iterations of this machine, Anduril will do away with the pressure hull and let water freely flood through the vehicle.
- The key systems within are sealed up in their own, much smaller watertight pressure modules, and while this does make individual components more of a pain to get into, it’s much cheaper to build a bunch of small pressure hulls than one big one, and if one of them fails, only the equipment in that module will be damaged.
Enormous underwater military drone won’t be waterproof
