Shipyards don’t usually get second acts. When the Appledore yard in North Devon shut its gates in March 2019, a site that had been building ships on the River Torridge since 1855 ran out of orders, and around 200 workers were shown the door. The whole place sold the following year for \u00a37 million, with exactly one employee left on the books: the site manager.<\/p>\n
So the plan Appledore’s new owner laid out this month takes a second to process. Navantia UK, the British arm of Spain’s state-owned shipbuilder, says the yard is now set up to build two of its LASV75 warships side by side and deliver two a year. And the LASV75 is not a normal warship. It’s a 246-foot, 1,000-plus-ton vessel designed from the keel up to sail with nobody aboard.<\/p>\n
The name is literal: Large Autonomous Surface Vessel, 75 meters. No bridge, no bunks, no galley, because there’s no crew to put in them. In a country that spent the 20th century launching the world’s most famous ocean liners, one of its oldest working yards is now betting its comeback on ships that will never need a crew list.<\/p>\n
The capacity claim landed on July 10, when Rear Admiral Matthew Stratton, the UK’s Director Naval Acquisition, toured the Devon yard. According to UK Defence Journal<\/a>, Navantia UK’s production engineers have worked out a manufacturing plan that lets Appledore construct two LASV75s concurrently, using digital design and modular block construction to hit a delivery rate of two vessels per year.<\/p>\n That’s a bold number for a yard this size. It’s also, so far, a plan without a customer. Nobody has ordered an LASV75. The vessel only exists as a matured design concept and a scale model, and the Royal Navy hasn’t committed a single pound to it.<\/p>\n But the pitch is aimed at a very real hole in the fleet, and the timing of the announcement, days after the UK published a defense plan built around exactly this kind of ship, was not an accident.<\/p>\n Navantia UK unveiled the LASV75<\/a> as a scale model at the Combined Naval Event in Farnborough, held May 19-21. The hull runs 75 meters (246 feet) with an 11.8-meter beam and displaces more than 1,000 metric tons, which puts it at roughly half the length of a Royal Navy Type 45 destroyer. For an uncrewed surface vessel, that’s enormous. Most drone boats in service today are closer in size to a bass boat.<\/p>\n Deleting the humans is the entire design philosophy. Because there’s no accommodation block, no life support and no mess deck, all of that volume goes to fuel, payload and endurance instead. The deck takes containerized mission modules, the sensor fits are interchangeable, and the mast itself is modular.<\/p>\n Depending on what you bolt on, the same hull handles surveillance, escort duty, electronic warfare or strike work. Since the May unveiling, the company says it has matured configurations for anti-air warfare, anti-submarine warfare and naval fires against land targets, and the open architecture lets a single vessel be re-roled even at sea.<\/p>\n Simon Jones, product development director at Navantia UK, told Naval News<\/a> the design came out of the company’s Bristol team with one scenario in mind: keeping a persistent watch on the North Atlantic in brutal cold-weather conditions. “We believe something of this scale is necessary,” Jones said. The company is also looking at NATO-standard payload interfaces, so an allied navy’s modules could drop straight onto a British hull.<\/p>\n Appledore’s covered dock can only take hulls up to 120 meters, which is exactly why the yard fell out of the big-ship game. Modern frigates and destroyers outgrew it. Its last decade of glory was building bow sections for both of Britain’s Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carriers, and after Babcock closed the site in 2019, it sat dormant until Harland & Wolff’s then-owner picked it up in August 2020.<\/p>\n Then Harland & Wolff itself collapsed into administration in 2024, and Navantia bought the whole four-yard portfolio, Belfast, Appledore, Methil and Arnish, in January 2025. A 75-meter warship fits Appledore’s dock with room to spare. Suddenly the size limit that killed the yard is the thing that makes it the natural home for this class of ship.<\/p>\n Navantia UK is putting \u00a3157 million (about $210 million) into modernizing the four sites, and Appledore has already received a new pipe shop and plasma-cutting equipment. The company claims its digital design tools will cut delivery timelines for large naval vessels by up to 30%.<\/p>\n The yard isn’t sitting idle while it waits for a drone-warship order, either. Under the \u00a31.6 billion Fleet Solid Support program, Appledore is building the bow sections for all three of the Royal Fleet Auxiliary’s new supply ships, with final assembly happening in Belfast. Steel for the first of those ships was cut at Appledore in December 2025, and an 85-meter purpose-built barge named Seahorse, launched at Methil in early May, now ferries the finished blocks between Devon and Belfast.<\/p>\n One detail that’s easy to garble: that December steel belongs to a crewed supply ship, not to the LASV75. The drone warship remains a concept. What’s real today is the industrial machinery being assembled to build it fast if anyone signs.<\/p>\n The customer Navantia is courting has spent 2026 talking itself into exactly this kind of fleet. The UK’s new Defence Investment Plan commits \u00a31.3 billion to a “hybrid navy” of crewed warships working alongside autonomous platforms, coordinated by six planned Common Combat Vessels. Per UK Defence Journal’s reporting, that plan arrived at the cost of the Type 83 destroyer and Type 32 frigate programs, which were dropped along the way.<\/p>\n The First Sea Lord, Gen. Sir Gwyn Jenkins, has been unusually blunt about the timeline, saying at the same Farnborough event that his aim is to have “the first of our uncrewed escort ships sailing alongside our Royal Navy warships” within two years, per Future Warfare Magazine<\/a>. In May, the Ministry of Defence went further and asked industry for missile silos that can sit at sea, ready to fire, for 30 days without a human touching them. An anti-air version of the LASV75 is precisely the kind of hull you’d put those in.<\/p>\n And the Navy has already started buying small. It picked up 20 of Kraken’s K3 Scout drone boats, each 8.4 meters long, in March, and it sent a single 12-meter drone boat into the mined Strait of Hormuz<\/a> this spring rather than risk a crewed minehunter. The US is running the same play at a bigger scale: DARPA’s 240-ton USX-1 Defiant just crossed 2,100 miles of open ocean<\/a> with nobody aboard, and Leidos is pitching its Sea Archer on swarm-of-cheap-hulls logic<\/a>. The LASV75 is the British bid to jump from drone boats to drone ships in one move.<\/p>\n Plenty of blanks still need filling in. Navantia hasn’t published a top speed, a range figure or a propulsion arrangement for the LASV75, and a hull that can navigate itself across the North Atlantic is a very different problem from one trusted to employ weapons on its own. Donato Martinez, Navantia UK’s CEO, was careful to keep the order of operations straight during the admiral’s visit: “Our immediate priority remains the successful delivery of the three FSS vessels.”<\/p>\n Sensible. The drone warships can wait for a contract. Right now, the only steel being cut at Appledore belongs to ships that will still have people on them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Shipyards don’t usually get second acts. When the Appledore yard in North Devon shut its gates in March 2019, a … <\/p>\nNo crew quarters means more room for weapons<\/h2>\n
A dead yard, a \u00a37 million sale, and a very specific niche<\/h2>\n
The Royal Navy wants hulls it doesn’t have to crew<\/h2>\n