{"id":21518,"date":"2026-09-30T08:00:11","date_gmt":"2026-09-30T12:00:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/?p=21518"},"modified":"2026-09-30T05:14:20","modified_gmt":"2026-09-30T09:14:20","slug":"18-foot-polish-drone-boat-two-shapes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/18-foot-polish-drone-boat-two-shapes\/","title":{"rendered":"An 18-foot Polish drone boat that weighs about 1,430 pounds, runs 24 hours on an outboard and tops out near 30 knots comes in two shapes, a tall one with radar and sonar on a mast and a low one cut down to stay out of sight for strike missions"},"content":{"rendered":"

Most of the drone boats in the news this year are built to blow up. Ukraine’s have spent three years going after Russian warships in the Black Sea, Turkey has 40 kamikaze boats on order, including a 26-footer we covered in September<\/a> that carries 551 pounds of explosive in its nose, and the general logic seems to be that an uncrewed hull is mostly a cheap way to deliver a warhead. Poland’s newest drone boat makes a different bet. It’s 18 feet long, it runs on the same 40-horsepower Yamaha outboard you’d find pushing a fishing skiff, and its whole sales pitch is that one hull comes in two shapes.<\/p>\n

The boat is the StormRider 550, and it premiered on September 8 at MSPO in Kielce. If you don’t follow the defense trade circuit, MSPO is one of Europe’s biggest arms shows, and it runs every September in a Polish city a couple hundred miles from the coast, which apparently doesn’t stop the naval hardware from showing up anyway. The company behind it is WB Group, Poland’s largest privately owned defense manufacturer, and the 550 was one of a stack of premieres it brought to the show.<\/p>\n

Here’s the machine, as reported by Militarnyi<\/a>, whose correspondent looked it over on the floor: 18 feet long (5.5 meters, which is where the 550 in the name comes from), about 1,430 pounds before it goes in the water, a top speed around 30 knots, and a patrol crawl of 4 to 6 knots it can hold for up to 24 hours. That’s the data paragraph, and I’ll be honest, nothing in it is exotic. Thirty knots is about 35 mph. Your neighbor’s bass boat goes faster.<\/p>\n

WB also says the boat operates safely up to sea state 3, which caps out around 4-foot waves. So this is a machine for ports, rivers, anchorages and coastal water, and nobody’s pretending otherwise. What you’re really buying sits on top of the hull.<\/p>\n

\n
\n
LENGTH<\/div>\n
18 FT<\/div>\n
5.5 meters. The 550 in the name is the hull length.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n
WEIGHT<\/div>\n
1,430 LB<\/div>\n
About 650 kilograms, measured before launch.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n
TOP SPEED<\/div>\n
30 KNOTS<\/div>\n
About 35 mph, out of a 40-hp Yamaha outboard.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n
PATROL<\/div>\n
4-6 KNOTS<\/div>\n
Held for up to 24 hours on one outing, per WB Group.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n
ACTIVE<\/div>\n
BIG SISTER<\/div>\n
28 FT<\/div>\n
The StormRider 850 exercised with a Polish Navy frigate in the Baltic in July.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

So why build one boat in two shapes?<\/h2>\n

The tall version wears a mast with a navigation radar, sonar and an electro-optical camera head, the standard gear for staring at water for hours at a time. Polish defense site Strefa Obrony<\/a> got a close look at the display boat and reported a Furuno radar, a FLIR camera and a Starlink terminal on it, so we’re talking pretty much off-the-shelf hardware you could price out yourself. In this shape the 550 runs long patrols, watches harbor approaches, maps the bottom and hunts for objects lying on it, including the kind that explode. It’ll also inspect underwater infrastructure, and if you’ve followed the Baltic news over the past couple of years, you can guess why that line made the brochure.<\/p>\n

The low version is the same hull with the superstructure cut down, so the boat sits lower and shows less of itself to anyone’s radar. WB pitches this one for strike missions, and here I have to level with you: the company hasn’t published what the strike configuration actually carries. Polish trade reporting from WB’s pre-show briefing describes a one-way strike unit with a warhead, plus an interceptor version that goes after other drone boats by ramming them or detonating right alongside, but I can’t find a disclosed weapons fit anywhere. There’s also a training version whose entire job is playing target so navy gunners have something honest to shoot at.<\/p>\n

Why would you ram a robot with a robot?<\/p>\n

Because the alternatives cost more. Shooting small fast boats with a warship’s gun is expensive practice, and jamming only works if the incoming boat is listening to something you can jam. Sending an expendable 18-footer to T-bone another expendable 18-footer is, frankly, the kind of math that wins procurement meetings.<\/p>\n

Its big sister already has sea time with NATO<\/h2>\n

The 550 didn’t come out of nowhere. WB introduced the 28-foot StormRider 850 at the same Kielce show a year earlier, and that one carries real weapons options, either a remote-controlled gun module or launchers for WB’s own Warmate loitering munitions. The 850 has been busy since. It made its international debut at a NATO Task Force X demonstration in the central Mediterranean, as MILMAG<\/a> reported, and in July it ran joint exercises in the Baltic with ORP Gen. T. Ko\u015bciuszko, a Polish Navy frigate of the American-built Oliver Hazard Perry class. WB says the sensor feed from that exercise streamed live to the NATO summit while it happened. As track records go, that’s a pretty decent one for a boat family barely a year old, and it’s what keeps the 550 from being a science project looking for a mission.<\/p>\n

The 550 itself is still a trade-show boat, keep in mind. WB told Polish media it spent recent months in testing, but the 850’s the one with operational sea time.<\/p>\n

Norway signed up on day one<\/h2>\n

On September 8, the same day the 550 premiered, WB and Norway’s Kongsberg signed an agreement to jointly develop and produce autonomous maritime platforms, as The Defense Post<\/a> reported. The plan starts with multi-sensor reconnaissance boats and command-and-control integration, with weapons for hitting surface targets penciled in down the line. WB Group CEO Piotr Wojciechowski said the aim is systems “capable of operating in the Baltic Sea as well as other maritime theaters,” which is diplomatic phrasing for the obvious. The Baltic is where undersea cables and pipelines keep turning up damaged, and every navy on that sea wants more cheap hulls that can watch a patch of water for a day at a time.<\/p>\n

I’ll admit the two-shape idea isn’t unique. A British drone boat we looked at in September<\/a> swaps entire payload cassettes in the field, Ukraine bolts interceptor boxes to its decks, and half the industry now sells modularity as the headline feature. What WB has that most of them don’t is a family already exercising with a NATO navy, at a size you can tow behind a pickup, which arguably matters more than anything on the spec sheet.<\/p>\n

So who gets it first? Remigiusz Wilk, WB Group’s communications director, told the Polish military outlet Polska Zbrojna in late August that the 550’s size could make it the first StormRider the Polish Navy actually puts to work, starting out as a training target for fleet gunners. Somebody in every family lands their first job by getting shot at, and apparently in this one it’s the little brother.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Most of the drone boats in the news this year are built to blow up. Ukraine’s have spent three years … <\/p>\n

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