Low-Tech Anti-Piracy Solution Based on Backyard Sprinkler Toys
The curtain is a two-pronged anti-piracy attack aimed that aims to make it prohibitively difficult for pirates to pull up alongside a shipping vessel and board it using ladders, the typical method of operation for pirates operating in places like the Horn of Africa.
Using the ship’s onboard firefighting water pump system, the first countermeasure dumps huge amounts of water off the side of the ship via high-volume nozzles, which soaks anyone below and would fill a pirate skiff with water at a rate of about a centimeter per second, eventually causing the boat to sink or capsize.
The second and more intimidating prong of this forked attack involves the deploying of high pressure hoses down the sides of the ship. Each hose is attached to a sinker weight that keeps the nozzle down near the water’s surface, and the restrictive nozzle at the end ensures that the water coming out does so at high-pressure. The result: a long hose belching a stream of stinging high-pressure water while lashing about violently. Several of these deployed down the side of a ship make it difficult to put a ladder up the side of the vessel, much less to climb aboard the ship.
“Yo Dawg, I heard you like robots, so I put a robot in your robot.”
(BTW did I mention this is a robot for SPYING ON PIRATES!?!?!)
The 1-pound ship-boarding bot would launch from a “marsupial robot deployment system,” in which a larger robot would carry it to its deployment location. Its magnetized wheels would then carry it up and over a ship hull to spy on pirates.
(via Aaargh! Micro-bot climbs ships to spy on pirates | Crave - CNET)
