For decades, when a small warship has needed to hit another ship from a long way off, the job has usually gone to its helicopter. The frigate carries the helicopter, the helicopter carries the missiles, and the ship gets to stay well back from whatever it’s shooting at.<\/p>\n
The Royal Navy<\/a> just gave a pretty vivid demo of how that works. On September 29 it published an account of a Wildcat, the small helicopter that flies off British frigates and destroyers, hitting the decommissioned USS Klakring with Sea Venom anti-ship missiles on a range off northwest Scotland. The Navy calls it the first time a Wildcat has put a live, operational Sea Venom into a realistic target. A Wildcat carries four of them.<\/p>\n So I find it a little funny that four’s also the number of Sea Venoms a German startup says it’s integrated onto a boat with nobody aboard.<\/p>\n That startup is STARK, a Berlin defense company you’d probably know, if at all, for its flying attack drones. The boat’s the Vanta 12, which STARK unveiled on September 28 as a 39-foot drone boat that can patrol for weeks, keep watch over a big stretch of sea and, with a human’s approval, go after what it finds. “Vanta 12 combines long-endurance surveillance, autonomous operation and scalable effectors in a single platform,” Johannes Arlt, STARK’s managing director for the Nordics, said in the announcement. That’s corporate for: it watches, it drives itself, and you can bolt weapons onto it.<\/p>\n The company’s numbers are in the box below, and the short version is that this thing’s built to go a long way and stay there. STARK says it’ll cover up to 1,200 nautical miles, which works out to about 1,380 of the miles on your car’s odometer. Its release says the boat tops 40 knots, while Hartpunkt, a German defense site, wrote up the same announcement with a top speed of up to 40 knots instead. Call it about 46 mph either way, from a hull roughly the length of a city bus.<\/p>\n A loitering munition is basically a drone and a warhead in the same airframe. It flies out, circles an area while an operator picks something to hit, then dives into it and doesn’t come back.<\/p>\n STARK’s version is called Cascade, and the company says it reaches targets up to 62 miles away with a 10-pound payload. It comes out of a tube, and STARK pitches it for launchers on vehicles and boats alike. The company says it’s integrated ten of them on the Vanta 12 and launched them from the boat, though I can’t tell from the wording whether all ten have actually flown off it or just some.<\/p>\n So why put drones and missiles on the same hull?<\/p>\n Because they’re built for different targets. MBDA<\/a>, which makes Sea Venom, designed it as a helicopter-launched anti-ship missile that can hit targets over the horizon, and the Royal Navy says it’s meant to defeat corvette-sized ships or knock frigates and destroyers out of a fight. Cascade covers the rest. Hartpunkt, working from STARK’s announcement, says the boat can use it against targets on land, so one hull can threaten a ship offshore and whatever’s parked on the coast behind it.<\/p>\n Frankly, I’d argue the drones are the more interesting half of that loadout. They’re the half that’s actually left the boat.<\/p>\n STARK took the Vanta 12 to REPMUS before it announced anything. If you haven’t heard of REPMUS, it’s NATO’s yearly gathering of robots at sea: navies, companies and universities show up on the Portuguese coast near Tr\u00f3ia with drone boats, underwater drones and the software that ties them together, and run all of it for weeks. This year’s edition wrapped up on September 25 after drawing about 1,500 people from 36 navies, according to NATO<\/a>.<\/p>\n STARK says the boat ran simulated missions there alongside crewed ships and other drone boats. Hartpunkt’s report adds that it launched Cascade munitions during the exercise and simulated the Sea Venom shots. So as far as I can tell, nobody’s fired a Sea Venom off one of these boats yet.<\/p>\n That makes sense once you look at the missile. The Sea Venom that’s in service today gets launched from helicopters, and MBDA said in a statement quoted by Tectonic Defense that it’s developing a surface-launched version. Firing off a deck is apparently different enough from firing off a helicopter that it needs its own variant. The Vanta 12 has company at this stage, too. A 39-foot American drone boat wrapped in solar panels<\/a> showed off a weapons turret in August, and its makers have only announced detection and tracking from it so far.<\/p>\n The Vanta 12 also has a slightly awkward little sister. In August, the Bundeswehr<\/a> took delivery of a 20-foot STARK boat built on the smaller Vanta-6 hull, christened it Seetaube, which means sea dove, and described it as an unarmed system. It went to the German military’s cyber and information command rather than the navy, and its whole job is listening for radio transmitters<\/a>.<\/p>\n The idea’s pretty simple. One antenna can tell you which direction a radio signal came from, but not how far off it is, so a lone ship only gets a line on the map. Park the Seetaube somewhere else, take a second line, and the transmitter sits where the two lines cross.<\/p>\n The Bundeswehr says it picked the name partly to signal a system committed to peace, and that the boat still has months of testing ahead before it’s formally commissioned. So in roughly two months, the same company delivered a boat named with peace in mind and rolled out a bigger one built to carry ten attack drones and four anti-ship missiles. That’s arguably the smartest part of STARK’s pitch, though. It’s one family of hulls, and the customer decides how much firepower goes on top.<\/p>\n Even where the Vanta 12 gets built has more than one answer, depending on which version of the news you read. Hartpunkt reports that STARK’s teaming up with the Flensburg shipyard FSG to build the Vanta family in northern Germany. STARK’s Nordic announcement talks up a Danish partner building the smaller Vanta-6 in Denmark, and Tectonic Defense, working from STARK’s British statement, describes the new boat as UK-built. Take your pick. That’s three countries for one boat family, which is pretty good marketing, if nothing else.<\/p>\n For now, Sea Venom’s real-world track record runs through helicopters. The Royal Navy’s account of its Wildcat hitting the old USS Klakring went up on September 29, the day after STARK unveiled a 39-foot drone boat with four of the same missile integrated on board, so far fired only in simulation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" For decades, when a small warship has needed to hit another ship from a long way off, the job has … <\/p>\nSo what’s a loitering munition doing on a boat?<\/h2>\n
The Sea Venom shots were simulated<\/h2>\n
STARK’s smaller boat went to Germany unarmed<\/h2>\n