Dig Dug & the Deep Digger

Leave it to Defense Tech to dig up this scoop on the Deep Digger, the latest round of bunker busters which parachutes down and drills and scrapes it's way through the earth, apparently, much further than current warheads can go that rely on kinetic energy to penetrate at impact. That's because this missile head's got its own teeth made to gnaw out tunnels so bombs can burrow in deep enough to bust even the most buried villainous hideouts.

But, maybe, one day they'll get smart, and once deployed be able to seek out unknown subterranean lairs on their own. An earth full of geologic termites chasing acoustic sonar, or something. Viral mining machines and remote controlled missile worms. Scarier, perhaps, is the image of an Army general and his grandson kicking back thumbing this new Sony gamepad, enjoying a classic game of Dig Dug together, like all good gamers do. Just the two of them, sharing a rather eerie Nintendo, Hallmark, Go Army moment, as they watch their little arcade hero go mucking a frenzy, drilling and exploding, whittling tectonic cavities at the slightest twitch of a finger.


If video games one day became the interface for conducting actual war, then a new generation of Dig Dug-obsessed gamers would go ballistic tunneling underground wormhole-matrixes with the Deep Digger. Dig Dug tunnel patterns as 'gamer signatures' of real-time strategy bunker articulation. So that, while enemy bunker spaces are exposed and dismantled, an entirely new underground complex is rendered in it's place in the process. All through out the course of a little handheld game. It's an offshoot military application of Geoff's void grinder, but less Gothic and more Giger. Dig Dug and the art of illicit infrastructure-blasting. Or, it's an Army Corps of Engineers version of Chutes and Ladders. Whatever, the Deep Digger's gonna be the stealthy pimp daddy of future nuke engineers.

Check out the two-part series by Weapons Grade author David Hambling: New Bomb Drills for Bunkers (part 1), and Breaking Rocks - Lots of Rocks (part 2), which speculates on other potential uses and applications, such as: precise building incision, surgical demolition, debris removal for rescue efforts...oh and vault cracking, too. Fascinatnig stuff, as always.