Modular Swarm Undersea Payload

Final In-Class Presentation

The original task was tactical. Lower the cost of the Navy’s MK 48 torpedo. Make a legacy weapon cheaper, faster to produce, maybe easier to deploy. But the Hydra Strike team saw something else.

They interviewed submarine officers who described the pressure of holding fire — not because the threat was unclear, but because each torpedo cost more than three million dollars. They heard about reload times that took hours, targeting systems locked to single kills, and command decisions weighed down by scarcity.

By the end of the course, they weren’t trying to fix the MK 48. They were building something entirely new. A modular swarm payload. A one-to-many strike system. A prototype designed not for Cold War doctrine, but for saturation conflict in the Indo-Pacific. Something that gives commanders back what they've lost — initiative.

What began as an affordability project became a challenge to the Navy’s core assumptions about deterrence.

What Was at Stake

The MK 48 is a heavyweight torpedo. Precise, powerful, and slow to build. It excels in controlled environments, against high-value targets, with clear rules of engagement. But the future undersea fight won’t follow those rules.

In a war with a near-peer adversary, U.S. submarines will be outnumbered. One officer told the team that every shot was a calculation. Not of accuracy, but of regret. Fire too early, and you waste a munition. Wait too long, and you lose the target.

Operators weren’t asking for a cheaper torpedo. They were asking for more effects per launch. A way to act before the perfect window. A tool that buys time, space, and options when the math is against you.

Hydra Strike reframed the problem. The issue wasn’t price. It was paralysis.

Discovery in Motion

The team ran 142 interviews over the course of ten weeks. They talked to submarine captains, weapons officers, acquisition leads, undersea warfare strategists, and swarming robotics experts. They listened to stories of comms-denied environments, GPS failures, adversary spoofing, and decoy systems that made single-shot engagements a gamble.

One pattern kept surfacing. Naval operators needed a way to create chaos for the adversary — without risking a limited inventory of precision weapons.

So the team pivoted. They dropped the idea of a stripped-down MK 48 and started sketching a new architecture altogether. A deployable pod that could be launched from subs, surface ships, drones, or unmanned underwater vehicles. Once in the water, it would split into multiple autonomous effectors, capable of overwhelming a target through coordinated action.

They called it the StrikePod.

MVP That Pushed the Frame

The StrikePod is platform-agnostic, modular, and intentionally expendable. Each pod contains multiple low-cost effectors that can execute a distributed strike without requiring constant communications or external guidance.

The team prototyped a physical unit and tested its stability and dispersal mechanics using hardware-in-the-loop simulation. They mapped early performance metrics and coordinated technical design with operational use cases modeled from real-world threat scenarios.

It wasn’t just a technical project. It was a reframing of lethality — designed not to replace the MK 48, but to fill the gap it leaves behind.

Operators of Another Kind

• Andrew Coullard, Navy EOD veteran with 8 years defusing bombs across multiple theaters. Led AI/ML initiatives in undersea drone portfolio. Bridges operator experience, Chinese manufacturing knowledge, and venture innovation. Recent top-6 finisher at national security hackathon with Dark Vessel Labs.

• Seth Rhodes, Mechanical engineering student with aerodynamics expertise from Joby Aviation's eVTOL program. Founder of SR Technologies and disaster-relief nonprofit Light Up Puerto Rico. Brings design and community impact experience.

• Gabriel Noya, Electrical engineering student with NVIDIA robotics and BTG Pactual AI experience. Background in chip design, ML optimization, and physics simulations. Former startup tech lead combining AI performance with hardware products.

• Breno Casciello, Engineering and design lead with Stanford Hypersonics Lab experience. Developed self-operating hydrofoil surfboard and rocket hardware. Specializes in lightweight structures for torpedo design to reduce drag and extend range.

• Alex Wang, Computer science lead developing autonomous RL algorithms for real-time detection and precision targeting. CS master's candidate (AI/ML) with ML pipeline experience at Alkymi and tech investment analysis at Silver Lake. Provides algorithmic intelligence for Hydra Strike.​

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Together, the team combined field perspective, technical fluency, and the confidence to break from default solutions. They didn’t just work within constraints. They challenged them.

Mission Forward

Hydra Strike presented to senior leaders at NAVSEA and ONR. Their system is now under consideration for wargaming, prototyping, and early research transition funding. The team is pursuing next-stage development through SBIR and mission partner alignment.

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They didn’t finish with a cheaper weapon. They finished with a new way to think about strike capacity in an environment where hesitation is deadly.

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They came in thinking they were fixing a torpedo. They left having built the kind of option commanders wish they had.