The development of new types of weapons and self-propelled vehicles in the XX century in the USSR was assigned a special role. And today I would like to talk about a truly unique development - an underground boat, a subterrine, known under the code name "Battle Mole".
Ideas for creating such a device were wandering in the minds back in the thirties. The Soviet design engineer Alexander Trebelev and, in parallel with him, the German von Wern were developing designs for vehicles capable of moving in the ground. Later, comparing the drawings of these devices, the researchers concluded that they were almost "twins."
Moreover, if Trebelev's project was closed, despite a number of successful tests (its mechanism in theory developed speeds up to 10 km / h), due to the general unreliability of the device and the method of energy consumed by it (which was supplied from the surface via cable), then von Vern received a patent to your mechanism. Its subterrine, in theory, developed 7 km / h, but carried up to 5 people on board and about three hundred kg of cargo.
Presumably the von Verne mechanism.
However, World War II buried both projects. In the forties, there were attempts to refine Trebelev's design, and even a prototype was built, but …
And the von Werne subterrine remained completely unrealized, as they say, in favor of a more ambitious device of fascist Germany - Ritter's project "Serpent of Midgard" (such a large-scale mechanism should be described in a separate article), which also turned out to be incomplete.
Further - more interesting, although the information is even less. All information about the work in the direction of underground boats was strictly classified. The following is known for sure: in 1964, subterins with an atomic engine were tested. This was the "Battle Mole" project.
Promotional video:
The boat was made of titanium, the hull of an elongated cylindrical shape had (according to various sources) from three to four meters in diameter and a total length of about twenty-five to thirty-five meters. The heavy-duty drill allowed a speed of seven to fifteen meters per second, depending on the hardness of the soil. Payload - fifteen people and a ton of cargo.
To promote the "Battle Mole", a special soil destruction technology was developed, as well as the movement system itself. The mysterious cavitation flow that forms around the hull made it possible to pass even hard rocks.
Recovered (presumptive) schemes of the Battle Mole.
"War Mole" was tested first in the Moscow region, and after successful experiments, continued in the Urals. It is known about two tests - the first one took place near Kushva, near Nizhniy Tagil and ended in complete success - after passing the planned distance, the boat destroyed the conditional target and got to the surface, “making holes” through one of the mountains.
During the second, scheduled for the passage of a harder rock, the miracle device exploded, showered the tunnel. The entire crew died, and the underground boat was tightly walled up in the thickness of the Ural ridge.
The already secret development was classified even more and, apparently, abandoned. Although - who knows. Maybe such subterins have been working underground for a long time, transferring top-secret information to top-secret departments.
