Why is it necessarily adapted, and not just a sonobouy? Why placed by frogmen? When there are joint naval exercises in the Pacific (like the US does with South Korea annually, for example) hundreds of them get dumped into the ocean by helicopters and planes and are left to drift and sink. It’s not unreasonable to…
“function is not right”
Yep, they US Navy considers them expendable, and does not recover them. Literally hundreds could be dropped during multi-national fleet exercises.
More likely dropped from a plane or helicopter. That’s how sonobouys are typically deployed.
Typically side-scan sonars have “wings” to stabilize in the water, and towing hardware. My money’s on being a sonobouy. Size and shape are right on the mark.
If by “Many years” you mean something like several years, but not several decades, I wholly agree.
Not necessarily. There are fiber optics used on some aircraft, they aren’t connected to anything external, they are used for communication between components.
1 - It doesn’t need to be long range to communicate between the circuit boards inside. Clearly the fiber wouldn’t be used to communicate to something externally, or they could have just followed the fiber and see where it was plugged in.
It likely has zero range. It looks the right size and shape for a sonobouy. They’re dropped in the water to form ad-hoc sonar networks and they just drift and or sink after they are used. They are not self propelled.
The size, shape and technology all look right on the mark for a US Navy sonobouy. They get dropped into the Pacific in large numbers to set up ad-hoc sonar networks during military exercises. They are expendable and drift and or sink after they are used.
It is much too narrow to launch from a submarine torpedo tube.
The size looks right on the mark for a sonobouy. We drop them from planes and choppers in large numbers during exercises (and would in war-time) to collect underwater audio intel (submarine hunting), then they are left to drift or sink. They basically form temporary high-fidelity sonar networks.
