Nomars: No Manning Required Ship
20 comments
·March 7, 2025mjd
The article is really lacking all details.
Is this a fighting ship, or materials transport, or something else? Is it intended to go from A to B, or to go out and patrol around and come back? How far away does it go from its base?
gertrunde
At this stage it looks like it's just a prototype/technology demonstrator for testing.
Other articles have mentioned testing automated refueling systems for this vessel, which implies a longer term patrol role.
Other naval vessels of similar displacement seem to generally have a range around 1500-2500 nm.
(All guesswork I'm afraid!)
rkagerer
Is it remote controlled, or some kind of autonomous behavior program?
littlestymaar
I can easily imagine how you could keep the mission crew out of the ship, having every operations being remote controlled.
But this is only a part of the crew: on a ship you have plenty of sailors who are onboard not because they are needed for the mission itself, but because you need them to keep everything running.
Having no one onboard means you cannot fix anything that starts misbehaving on the ship, and the likelihood of the ship being at least partly unavailable grows with the duration of the mission. You can work around that with redundancy or thanks to dedicated support ships with technicians onboard not too far away that can intervene when needed, but that needs to be taken into account.
I'm not saying that this kind of automation isn't possible or even desirable, just that it's in no way magical and it will need a complete rethinking of how military vessels operate, because if you just expect a warship to sail autonomously for 3 months without issues, you're going to be disappointed.
Almondsetat
>it's in no way magical and it will need a complete rethinking of how military vessels operate
"designing a seaframe from the ground up with no provision, allowance, or expectation for humans on board"
I think the thousands of engineers that made this crewless seaframe possible thought about it being crewless and all of which that entails.
littlestymaar
The part you quote is explicitly not about the engineers of the vessel. It's about everybody else in the Navy!
What I'm saying is that we are all used to operate in a certain way, and you cannot really expect the automated system to fawlessly adapt to the way you already operate. To benefit from the automation you need to change the way you operate in depth, and that's a much harder thing to do in the military than in the civilian world (where it's already not that easy in practice).
The engineering side of things is always the easiest part of the job, no matter how challenging one particular engineering achievement is.
Almondsetat
All branches of the military have been pushing for automation. As an example, 6th gen fighters are expected to either be crewless or to control swarms of smaller crewless drones from a distance and relay information.
shortrounddev2
I assume it has some kind of security built in because otherwise what would prevent a Russian dinghy from floating up and climbing on board
gregoriol
Why would one climb on board if the thing is not meant to be manned and doesn't have any controls on board?
Anyway, if I were to design such a thing for military, it would probably have some self-destruct option
pandemic_region
> Why would one climb on board if the thing is not meant to be manned and doesn't have any controls on board?
to drop a grenade down a vent ?
> Anyway, if I were to design such a thing for military, it would probably have some self-destruct option
What would trigger the self-destruct in your design ?
ahofmann
As far as I understood, the attack vector is different. Entering the ship is useless, there are no controls for humans.
mjd
Useless unless you want to blow it up, maybe. Or steal or sabotage the cargo.
gregoriol
If you want to blow it up, it's 100% easier without boarding it!
littlestymaar
It's never useless to get physical access to a computer system.
The fact that there's no driving wheel doesn't mean you cannot take control of the ship if you can plug your stuff to the right port.
eesmith
If so, that means the ship cannot visit any port, harbor or waterway which requires a locally qualified marine pilot onboard.
It also likely affects international treaties regarding the obligations of the master or officer in charge.
If the computers go down, and with no one aboard, is it considered abandoned? Can anyone claim salvage rights by hooking up a tow?
Currently, "vessels have an international duty to give reasonable assistance to other ships in distress for saving lives" (quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_salvage). How does that duty extend to uncrewed vessels?
I'm sure there are lawyers salivating at the chance to resolve these questions.
rspoerri
You only, but automatically, forfeit the ownership of you ship when you (as captain) accept a rope from somebody else and let you tow with it. You always have to throw your own rope to keep ownership.
trhway
Btw, the Ukrainian sea drones are already themselves carrying drones and MANPADs. Evolution from the ground up.
rspoerri
First the terminators controlled the sea. They blocked the trade routes and fishing.
actionfromafar
s/terminators/Amazon terminators/
Could it even compete with modern submarine drones/underwater gliders that are thousands of times cheaper/smaller and can cripple these bulky ships in seconds?