A 30-foot underwater drone, a compact experimental hull much smaller than the fiber-optic boat from the same yard, went into the water for the first time at a Taiwanese harbor on Wednesday, with no prior official announcement, to test autonomous navigation and modular payloads

Defense shows are full of hardware that looks great under the lights and never gets anywhere near the water. Some of it’s a mockup, some of it’s a scale model, and a fair amount of it quietly disappears before the next show comes around.

But one of the more interesting things on the floor in Taipei last September has now gotten wet.

On Wednesday, November 11, an underwater drone called the Black Whale went into Su’ao Harbor in Taiwan’s Yilan County for what local outlets describe as its first launch test. It’s about 30 feet long, its hull is all black, and it was developed by Lungteh Shipbuilding, a Yilan shipyard, together with two British companies. According to Army Recognition, nobody announced the test beforehand.

So how do we know about it? Li Chung-wei, a local military enthusiast, caught the hull on camera, and his photos ran in Liberty Times on November 12. The citizen-journalism site PeoPo published its own report the same day, and Army Recognition picked the story up from there.

So what is the Black Whale?

The Black Whale falls into a class of boat called an XLUUV, short for extra-large uncrewed underwater vehicle. Basically, it’s a drone submarine that’s too big to heave over the side by hand, so you need a crane or a pier to get it into the water.

It’s also supposed to find its own way around, and that’s harder underwater than you’d think. Radio signals don’t travel well through seawater, so once a drone like this dives, nobody’s realistically steering it with a joystick. It has to navigate on its own until it comes back up, and Army Recognition says that’s exactly the kind of environment it was designed for.

The other big idea is the modular hull. The Black Whale is built so the gear inside can change with the mission, which is kind of like swapping what’s in the bed of a pickup depending on the job. Liberty Times lists underwater intelligence gathering, anti-submarine warfare and mine countermeasures as the work it’s meant for. Those are intended jobs, though, and nobody has shown it doing any of them yet. Army Recognition calls the boat an experimental test bed, there to try out its navigation, its communications and how the mission gear plugs in.

It’s a lot smaller than Taiwan’s other drone sub

The only measurement every report agrees on is the length, about 30 feet. Covert Shores, the naval site run by analyst H I Sutton, posted provisional specs after the Taipei show: 6.5 feet across the beam and roughly 19,800 pounds. Nobody has confirmed those numbers this week, so I’d treat them as a ballpark rather than a spec sheet.

Lungteh is also the yard behind the Huilong, the much bigger drone submarine it developed with Taiwan’s National Chung-Shan Institute of Science and Technology. Army Recognition puts the Huilong at about 98 feet and an estimated 220,000 pounds, against the Black Whale’s 30 feet and provisional 19,800 pounds. If you want a Western reference point, France’s planned combat drone submarine is also more than 30 feet long, at more than 22,000 pounds.

So why build a second, smaller one?

Part of the answer seems to be how the two are controlled. As we covered over the summer, a United Daily News report said the Huilong has to be plugged into a fiber-optic line to be operated. The Black Whale is pitched as an autonomous boat in a compact, modular package, and Army Recognition says the two programs could end up complementing each other. Frankly, a 30-foot hull also looks like a lot less of a headache to move around and maintain than a 98-foot one, although that’s my read and not something Lungteh has said.

Lungteh isn’t new to drones, either. Li told Liberty Times that the yard’s Kuai Chi and Black Tide surface drone boats were handed over after passing validation, and that it has since shifted its focus underwater.

The British half of the team

Army Recognition names the two partners as MSubs and Marine AI. When the Black Whale first showed up in Taipei, Covert Shores pointed out that it looks a lot like MSubs’ own Manta XLUUV, just with an X-shaped rudder and a simpler propeller setup. I couldn’t find anything spelling out which company handles which part of the program.

MSubs has done big drone subs before. It built the XV Excalibur for the Royal Navy, a boat of about 39 feet and roughly 42,000 pounds, and it reportedly fired an American-made Mk 48 heavyweight torpedo in waters off Scotland in September. That’s a pretty serious track record for a partner to bring along. It doesn’t automatically carry over to the Black Whale, though, and Army Recognition says a comparable torpedo capability hasn’t been confirmed for it.

So is Taiwan’s navy buying it?

Not as far as anyone has said. According to Army Recognition, Taiwan’s navy hasn’t announced a procurement decision or a timeline for putting the boat into service.

Lungteh also hasn’t published the numbers you’d most want to see for a drone sub. How it’s powered, how deep it dives, how long it lasts and how fast it goes “have not been officially disclosed,” per the same report. That’s a bit like an automaker launching a truck without telling you what engine it has or how far it goes on a tank. Admittedly, for a military program that’s only just gotten its feet wet, it’s also pretty normal.

You may see this week’s test described elsewhere as sea trials. Liberty Times and Army Recognition both call it a first launch test, which is a much earlier step. Liberty Times says the point was to validate key underwater-warfare technology, and from the sound of it, the real open-water work comes later.

Taiwan has been building and buying a lot of smaller uncrewed hardware lately, including the 20-foot American Skelmir drone it wants to assemble on the island. A homegrown 30-foot hull with British know-how arguably slots into that strategy pretty neatly, assuming the testing goes well.

Lungteh first showed the Black Whale at the Taipei Aerospace & Defense Technology Exhibition last September. On November 11, a little over a year later, it finally made it into Su’ao Harbor.

Credit: defense-update.com

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Why can't the Black Whale be steered by radio once it dives underwater?

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