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Ukrainian intelligence naval drone kills five Russian divers trying to lift it
(www.pravda.com.ua)
this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2025
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Yeah I was hoping for something more James Bond. Like launching electrical probes like a tazer, or spinning blades or something. But this works too.
Now I wonder how intentional it was. If it had lost radio contact, that seems like somewhat dangerous default behavior.
naval ordinance are a military's most sacred secrets. from a military prerspective the consequences of a drone like this falling into enemy hands likely necessitates the "fail to the safe position" of "if we can't reach a drone, better to scuttle it than risk it falling into enemy hands"
I guess it would be pretty straightforward to to put a detonation timer kill switch on loss of contact. Say something like 30-60 minutes after loss of contact the drone blows up.
As well as the military secrecy aspect, they don't want these drones washing up on the shore where some civilians could accidentally set them off.
Plus an explosion near where you know it was is better than an explosion where you don't know. Thousands of naval mines ended up on beaches far flung where they were laid and moreover sometimes decades after the war.
Wouldnβt want to be QA on that project.
Maybe it has a sort of antihandling device just for this purpose
Maybe it didn't even lose contact.
Wouldn't be a surprise to avoid capture of tech, but maybe it was just an accident due to damage. A small explosion underwater (lithium batteries and fuel?) can be deadly enough. Maybe they're designed to self destruct but this one failed until it got handled (wouldn't you want it to destruct as soon as certain variables were exceeded?)
ukrainian drones already washed out on shore once when musk shut off starlink during one of first crimea raids, i'm sure they account for loss of signal now
I can see something like if it rolls over and can't right itself would be good reason to self detonate. Or maybe if it reaches a certain altitude
rolls over, gets taken out of the water, loses connection for some long time, gps indicates that it's on land, all of these suggest future reverse engineering and can be prevented easily