The Future of Drone Tech: Naval Launch Platforms

Hey, everybody. Good morning. From Rome, where the building that I’m staying in is. If you can see this curve here at the converted interior, that 2200 year old Roman bathhouse. The bathhouse has gone. But they recycle everything here over the years. Anyway, today we’re continuing on with the drone series, new military technologies that are in the process being unveiled and used right now. And today we’re going to talk about naval drones. Naval drones aren’t new. The Ukrainians have been using them against the Russians, really, since the start of the war, especially the second year. The sea baby is the primary variant. There’s also something called the Megara that has a pretty good track record. The idea is you basically take a small boat or a jet ski or something like that. Hook it up to an automated system pilot it remotely. The advantage of a sea drone, of course, is wait. You can put a bomb that waste several hundred pounds in it and then center on its way. 

And because most vessels don’t have the ability to shoot down at things that are in the water, they’re designed to shoot at other ships. Really, all they can do is put some people on the deck with machine guns or RPGs or something like that, and try to take shots as they come in. And so the Ukrainians have had immense success with these. 

The problem is simply range. And you can solve that with more fuel tanks to a certain degree. So we’ve seen a number of attacks that have gone quite a distance, even going as far as Novorossiysk, which is the major Russian port on the Black Sea and has made the Russian Navy’s position at places several completely untenable. And so the Russian Navy has actually had to evacuate Crimea. 

That’s all old stuff. What’s new, what’s happened in just the last month is that the Ukrainians have now regularized the installment of aerial drones on naval drones. See, one of the fun things about naval drones is because they’re on the water. They’re really hard to interrupt with electronic warfare and jamming. So you can basically right up to your target, whether it’s a port or a ship, before there’s any danger of it being interrupted. 

Whereas an aerial drone, if it’s flying in, sometimes it gets within a kilometer or a couple hundred meters of a target. And the ECM that the Russians use will then interrupt the signal and the thing will crash. That’s one of the reasons why these new memory drones are so important, because they get around that by giving decision making to the drone and the terminal phase. 

With naval drones, there’s really no chance of them being intercepted along the way. So what the Ukrainians have done is have built canisters that are incorporated into these sea drones. And when they get to a certain point, maybe ten, 20km away, they then eject aerial drones that are technically first person drones controlled by a pilot. And those fly into target things, which means that if you put it on a fiber optic tether, which they are, you get somewhere between a ten and a 50 kilometer range where you can send smaller drones out by about a half a dozen at a time. 

A couple of things that have already happened. Number one, they’ve got these canisters to launch them. So this isn’t an experimental technology already. It’s already in full deployment. The Ukrainians just kind of sprung it on everybody just a few weeks ago, which is causing a lot of havoc. Number two, you’re limited in terms of payload because those FPV drones typically can only carry a payload of 10 pounds or less. 

So they’re great for anti-personnel or maybe even anti vehicle, but you’re not going to use them to blow up say a battleship. But if you know what you’re doing you can target strategic pieces of ship, strategic pieces of refineries or ports and cause a lot of havoc in a way that the Russians haven’t yet to invent a technology to cope with, except for maybe a net that only gets you so far. 

Third, and for the war, the moment. Most importantly, there’s a lot of naval frontage in play. If you remember from the early phases of the war, the Russians invaded from the east and the south, with about 100,000 people moving north from Crimea to the Kherson area and east from the territories that the Russians had captured in the last war back in 2014, all the way to the Dnieper River. 

And that whole southern and eastern front is in place to a certain degree. Well, with these naval drones, the Ukrainians can now do whatever they want around Crimea and can go up the Dnieper River and hit the Russians in any number of spots without having to first preposition forces, much less drone pilots that can use long range transmission or even satellite communications to control the naval drone and then tether that through the existing telemetry out through the fiber optic cables to the first person drones. 

So the degree to which the Ukrainians just surprise assault really, anything at this point is only limited by the number of drones that they can have on the water. Now, this does change the nature of the sea babies and things like them, because now they’re becoming drone carriers as opposed to just suicide drones. That will probably trigger a new evolution in the manufacture, because right now they’re designed to be one way and that’s it. 

But from an engineering point of view, that is actually a very, very simple problem. Taking a suicide drone, taking the explosive off of giving it more fuel, more range capacity, and then ultimately more of these canisters. That’s something we’re probably going to see within a month or two. I could almost do that in my garage, and I’m kind of a technical invalid when it comes to things like that. 

Big shifts in that space. That’s it for now.