Military parades usually run on people. Soldiers march in blocks, tank crews wave from open hatches, and somebody important salutes it all from a stand. Ukraine marked its 35th Independence Day on August 24 with a parade that cut people out of the picture almost entirely: one-way attack drones, armed ground robots, and a column of drone boats motoring down the Dnipro River through Kyiv with nobody aboard any of them.<\/p>\n
The biggest hull on the river that day was brand new. UFORCE, the Ukrainian-founded company behind the Magura drone boats, picked the parade to unveil the Magura MV11, and this one breaks with the family business. The earlier Maguras made their reputation carrying explosives into the sides of Russian warships. This one is built to carry other drones.<\/p>\n
Basically, a mothership. In drone-world terms, that means the big vehicle whose job is hauling the small ones to work: the small drones fly the missions, and the big one plays parking garage, gas station, and cell tower for the rest. If “aircraft carrier for drones” just popped into your head, you’re basically there. Ukraine has been improvising that role with modified attack boats for a couple of years now, and the MV11 is the first Magura designed around it from the keel up.<\/p>\n
UFORCE published the numbers in its launch announcement<\/a> on August 25. The hull runs up to 39 feet (12 meters). It can haul 4,850 pounds (2,200 kilograms), stay out for seven days straight, and cover more than 2,000 nautical miles doing it. None of those figures has been demonstrated anywhere public yet, so file them as the manufacturer’s homework rather than a test result.<\/p>\n The design work happened a long way from the Black Sea. UFORCE was founded in Ukraine but keeps its headquarters in London, and the Magura family’s main design and R&D bureau sits in Portugal, where the company says the MV11 grew out of the Atlantic Ocean testing of its predecessor, the MV7. CEO Oleg Rogynskyy called the boat “a single carrier that transports and launches other unmanned systems far from shore” in the launch statement.<\/p>\n The configuration UFORCE has actually shown, on the river and in its own promo footage, is a deck packed with 18 Sting interceptors, each sitting upright in its own box launcher. TWZ<\/a> reports the boxes are standalone launchers that also work from a truck bed or flat ground.<\/p>\n If you haven’t met the Sting, it comes from Wild Hornets, a Kyiv outfit that builds interceptors, meaning drones whose entire job is flying into other drones. The Sting is an electric quadcopter that weighs roughly nine pounds, leans heavily on 3D-printed parts, and carries a small explosive charge. Its target of choice is the Shahed-type attack drone Russia launches at Ukrainian cities in near-nightly batches. Wild Hornets says it climbs to nearly 23,000 feet (7,000 meters) and reaches out around 23 miles (37 kilometers). A Sting that misses its window can be recovered and reused. Each one reportedly costs about $2,100, so a full deck of 18 works out to about $38,000 of ammunition.<\/p>\n So why park an anti-aircraft battery on the water?<\/p>\n Because a lot of those Shaheds come in over the sea. Ukrainian air defense crews are stretched thin catching drones and missiles over land, something TWZ has documented at length, and a boat that loiters offshore for a week gets to start thinning a swarm before it ever crosses the beach. It does that without risking a crew, and without pulling a land-based missile battery off targets that actually need a missile.<\/p>\n Eighteen Stings weigh about 160 pounds between them, before you count the boxes, on a hull rated for 4,850. UFORCE is arguably selling the empty space as much as the loadout: the company also describes a heavier air-defense version with several dozen interceptors, a full radar suite, and a gyro-stabilized .50-caliber (12.7 mm) turret. That version lives in a brochure. The boat on the Dnipro carried boxes and cameras.<\/p>\n UFORCE hasn’t said what actually spots an incoming drone from that deck. From the looks of the imagery TWZ examined, the mast at the stern carries a camera turret, a navigation radar, and two horn-shaped antennas, plus a fixed camera over the bow and what appear to be two satellite communication terminals on the main deck. TWZ flagged target detection as an open question, and suggested those horn antennas might listen passively for a drone’s radio emissions.<\/p>\n UFORCE pitches the MV11 for reconnaissance, surveillance, amphibious support, and running fuel and gear out to other drone boats, around the clock and in any weather. Ukraine has already rehearsed most of that playbook with smaller hulls. Drone boats have launched bomber drones against targets in Crimea. Ukrainian intelligence says Magura boats downed Russian Su-30 fighter jets with adapted Sidewinder missiles in 2025, billed by Kyiv as the first jet kills ever scored by a naval drone. In July of this year, per TWZ, a sea drone carried an armed ground robot across the water and put it ashore in Russian-held territory. A crewless Ukrainian boat even shot down a Shahed with an interceptor launched straight off the water<\/a> back in June, per Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces. The MV11 turns that one-off into a full magazine with a week of loiter time, and roughly 350 cubic feet (10 cubic meters) of open bay means most of those other jobs fit without a redesign.<\/p>\n Americans are already in the supply chain, too. UFORCE signed a partnership in July with ReconCraft, a Portland, Oregon builder of special operations craft, to produce Magura drones in the United States, a deal we covered when the ink was fresh<\/a>. And if 39 feet sounds familiar, it should: the American solar-powered drone boat with a turret in its nose<\/a> we wrote about this week measures 39 feet as well. Apparently that’s just the size a serious drone boat comes in now.<\/p>\n A human flies every Sting. The interceptor rides a wireless link with a pilot on the other end, and when TWZ published its rundown on August 25, it flagged the control setup from a hull offshore as an unanswered question and said it had asked UFORCE for details.<\/p>\nWhy bolt anti-aircraft drones to a boat?<\/h2>\n
Eighteen interceptors is a light load for this hull<\/h2>\n
The pilot is still a person<\/h2>\n