{"id":22085,"date":"2026-10-05T12:30:11","date_gmt":"2026-10-05T16:30:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/?p=22085"},"modified":"2026-10-05T06:36:44","modified_gmt":"2026-10-05T10:36:44","slug":"23-foot-drone-boat-winged-attack-launch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/23-foot-drone-boat-winged-attack-launch\/","title":{"rendered":"A 23-foot drone boat fired a winged kamikaze drone out of a launcher on its deck at a NATO exercise, the aircraft popped its wings open and streamed live video into the Spanish fleet’s combat software on the way to its target, and nobody was aboard the boat or the aircraft"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ukraine made the drone boat famous, mostly by using cheap ones to blow very expensive holes in Russian warships. Every navy with a coastline took notes, and the copycat phase keeps producing new tricks. Just this week we covered an 18-foot Turkish drone boat<\/a> that set off a live 220-pound warhead against a surface target. Spain’s now taken its swing, and it went a different way. Instead of turning the boat into the weapon, the Spanish Navy turned the boat into the launchpad.<\/p>\n

It happened at REPMUS, a NATO experimentation exercise the Portuguese Navy hosts off its coast every year; this edition ran from August 31 to September 25. A Spanish Navy drone boat carried a winged attack drone out to sea in a launcher on its deck and fired it off. The little aircraft powered up on command, flew away from the boat, streamed live video back into the Navy’s command systems, and arrived at its target. Arquimea<\/a>, the Madrid-based company that builds the drone, announced the test on September 29, and the Spanish defense outlet Infodefensa<\/a> identified the boat as the Sead 23, with the munition riding in a multiple launcher on deck.<\/p>\n

Nobody was aboard the boat. An operator ran the whole sequence remotely, and Arquimea says the drone did all of it while plugged into the NAIAD\/SCOMBA NG ecosystem under NATO’s STANAG 4817 standard. That’s a sentence I’ll translate in a minute, because it’s frankly the more interesting half of the demo.<\/p>\n

So was this a first?<\/h2>\n

Not exactly.<\/p>\n

Arquimea bills it as the first loitering munition launch from an unmanned surface vehicle, and that claim needs some scoping. MARTAC, a Florida company, fired Switchblade loitering munitions off its 38-foot Devil Ray catamaran<\/a> at targets in the Arabian Gulf back in 2023. Ukraine went further still in April, when a crewless boat launched an interceptor drone<\/a> that knocked a Russian Shahed out of the sky. So if you’re keeping score: it’s the first time the Q-SLAM-40 has flown off a boat, and the first time Spain’s navy has launched an attack drone from one of its own crewless vessels.<\/p>\n

\"Arquimea
Image credit: Arquimea<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The plumbing’s where I’d put my attention. SCOMBA is the combat management software that runs on Spanish warships, and STANAG 4817 is a NATO standard for how drones and control stations talk to each other, so one ally’s console can task another ally’s robot. Which matters more than you’d guess from the acronyms. A demo drone that only answers to its maker’s laptop is basically a science fair project. A drone that shows up inside a navy’s own combat system, as a weapon the fleet software can see and task, that’s a capability, and Arquimea got to prove that in front of participants from 36 countries and more than 130 companies.<\/p>\n

The boat only joined the Navy in December<\/h2>\n

The Sead 23 comes from Seadrone, a builder in Galicia, up in Spain’s green northwest, and it isn’t some trade show prototype. The Navy spent about two years wringing it out, running it through three earlier editions of REPMUS plus BALTOPS 24 and NATO’s Dynamic Messenger, and craning it on and off warships including the Juan Carlos I, Spain’s flagship. In December 2025, the Navy formally took delivery<\/a> at its drone experimentation center in Rota, after a deal Spanish trade press put at about 1.1 million euros. Nine months later it was launching aircraft.<\/p>\n

The Navy’s own spec sheet is refreshingly concrete. The hull runs 23 feet, a 250-horsepower diesel pushes it to a top speed of 34.5 mph, and it carries enough fuel for 230 miles if you hold it at a 17 mph cruise. Payload tops out at 661 pounds. The standard fit includes a seafloor-mapping sonar, a surface radar, a day-and-night camera and an AIS transceiver, the transponder system ships use to broadcast who they are and where they’re going.<\/p>\n

That 661-pound budget has to cover everything the Navy straps on, launcher and drones included, so a 23-footer’s a pretty modest thing to hang an air weapon on. The link setup’s what makes the whole thing work anyway. The boat talks over three different connections, satellite, radio and 5G, and hops between them automatically to keep the best one. Live drone video flowing through a crewless boat into a naval command center doesn’t happen unless those links hold.<\/p>\n

\n
\n
Length<\/div>\n
23 FT<\/div>\n
Crewless hull built by Seadrone, delivered to the Spanish Navy in December 2025.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n
Engine<\/div>\n
250 HP<\/div>\n
Single diesel, good for a 34.5 mph top speed on the Navy’s spec sheet.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n
Range<\/div>\n
230 MI<\/div>\n
On a full fuel load at a 17 mph cruise.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n
Payload<\/div>\n
661 LB<\/div>\n
The budget for every sensor, launcher and drone the Navy bolts on.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n
NATO TRIAL<\/div>\n
Comms links<\/div>\n
3 TYPES<\/div>\n
Satellite, radio and 5G, switched automatically. The drone’s live video rode this chain at REPMUS.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

And the drone it threw?<\/h2>\n

The Q-SLAM-40 is a loitering munition, which is the industry’s polite term for a kamikaze drone. If you haven’t run into the breed before, here’s the two-sentence version. It’s a small aircraft that gets fired out of a tube, pops open a set of folding wings, and circles an area while a human watches its camera feed. When the operator picks a target, the drone dives into it, and there’s no landing in the plan.<\/p>\n

Arquimea designed the ground version to be carried by two soldiers in backpacks and set up in minutes, with the operator in the loop for the whole mission. And the company’s spent the past couple of years bolting it to pretty much anything that will hold still: armored vehicle turrets, a five-tube launcher on a ground robot, and now a boat.<\/p>\n

There are a few things Arquimea hasn’t said, and I’d rather tell you than let you assume. The company hasn’t published which day the launch happened; its release is datelined September 23 from Tr\u00f3ia, the Portuguese base the exercise runs out of. It hasn’t said whether this flight carried a warhead, either. The account runs through remote activation, launch, communications, navigation and arrival at the target, and ends there, which is fairly standard for an experimentation exercise where the point is proving the chain works.<\/p>\n

Manuel Mart\u00edn, Arquimea’s general manager of defense, called REPMUS “an exceptional opportunity to demonstrate the performance of our solutions in demanding operational scenarios.”<\/p>\n

The company isn’t slowing down on the integration front, either. On September 30<\/a>, one day after announcing the boat launch, Arquimea and EM&E Group showed the Q-SLAM-40 integrated into the Guardian 30 remote weapon station for armored vehicles at the Spanish Army’s 2E+I Forum in Toledo.<\/p>\n

Image credit: Arquimea<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ukraine made the drone boat famous, mostly by using cheap ones to blow very expensive holes in Russian warships. Every … <\/p>\n

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