MSubs Ltd has been awarded a £15.4m contract to build the first XLUUV (Extra Large Uncrewed Underwater Vehicle) owned by the Royal Navy.
Project CETUS was announced by the MoD in January 2022, seeking tenders for an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle. Building on their experience with the MANTA XLUUV – a technology demonstrator built under a MoD Defence and Security Accelerator (DASA) programme, MSubs will design and construct the new bespoke vessel at their Plymouth facility. CETUS is funded as part of the RN’s Project Spearhead Anti-Submarine Warfare programme and this procurement will be managed by the Develop Directorate and the Submarine Delivery Agency. CETUS is the next step in developing autonomous underwater warfare capability and will also be used to inform concepts for the future underwater battlespace, feeding into the design of SSN(R) which will eventually replace the Astute Class SSNs.
CETUS will be the largest and most complex uncrewed submersible operated by any European navy and is due to be delivered to the RN within two years. The 17-tonne submarine will be 12 metres long and 2.2 metres in diameter. The design features two pressure vessels separated by a central payload bay. Notably, the vessel will be able to dive deeper than any vessel in the current submarine fleet and have a range of over 1,000 miles. It is a modular design with an optional payload section that can be added to double the capacity of the vessel while range can be increased by installing additional batteries.
Interesting. We can’t be left behind. But we can’t afford to do another 1957 White Paper.
Hopefully will go some way to returning operational bulk to the submarine fleet.
Well deserved win. A very interesting company and a great bunch of people.
What a fascinating modern age we are living in.
I hope they will retain the HMS prefix, so we might again see Bellerophon Thunderer and Polyphemus sail once again.
That’s pretty good going, only a few metres shorter than the base design Orca that the USN are developing. Those should be delivered end of this year- not sure whether that’s slipped or not. Will be interesting to see how quickly these can be turned around!
This will be a great space to be getting an early foothold in, as I expect that everyone with significant maritime interests will be moving this way in the medium to long term. Glad to see the RN supporting UK-based companies.
Hi Joe, as I understand things, Boeing Orca is some 4-5 years late, approx 250 nill dollars over budget at the last count. No indication of what the issues are/we’re, obviously not easy to get right.
Ah, thanks, I was wondering why the Wikipedia article was so short and hadn’t had an update..!
No, I can imagine getting something that complex to do everything it needs to with no human intervention, while also been waterproof and pressure-rated is going to be a challenge. Once they’ve got it down, though…!
GAO did a report on the Orca overruns if you want reasons (overconfidence, missing assessment steps, Covid, etc). I didn’t realize that the boat Boeing delivered this year isn’t actually one of the Orca prototypes. It’s a test boat that they asked for because the prototypes were running late.
Cheers.👍
Big issue is probably there in plain sight… Boeing. They’ve been notoriously late and/or had major issues with a lot of projects recently:- Starliner, SLS First Stage, KC-46, 787, 737 Max…
Yes, they do seem to be overstretched/out of their depth in certain areas, which, unfortunately for them is becoming a PR nightmare of epic proportions. Not really showing US kit in a good light is it?
Same size as the BAES Herne design, both sized to fit the contract spec which requires it to fit in a 40′ container.
Also of interest in the requirement spec:
12.The value of this procurement has a budget of £21.5m to complete the design and build of the AUV demonstrator and provide support of trials to include possible upgrade. Of which it is anticipated £5M shall be for support through tasking (WP4).
13.Following down selection, it is anticipated that the design will complete FY22/23 with delivery of the demonstrator vehicle following completion of build FY23/24. This is to be followed by a period of three years of technical support.
That’s a pretty aggresive timescale, and at a fraction of the cost of Orca.
Thanks Jon, let’s hope that they are able to deliver more successfully than Orca..! It’ll be a great capability if they pull it off, and I do like the thought of having it deliverable via ISO container. One of the things about ORca’s size is that it can only go in an ISO if they remove the central payload bay, as far as I can tell, which I presume would then need to go in its own separate container. Not the end of the world, but a least it’d be a bit quicker to drop CETUS into the water from “unpacking”.
MSubs know their stuff…we’re definitely in safe hands…
” Rise of the Machines”
Nah. It is small. It is short range. And any onboard intelligence will be worm like.
Don’t start worrying yet. 🙂
An iPhone type processor and memory at a minimum does more than worm like . The software still could be a major challenge
Drones are doing quite well to the East though, even if human controlled. It’s coming X, that’s why Skynet is here now !
Some questions
1: the boat is “all electric” propulsion? In other words, “1000 miles” (or 870nm) are achieved with only battery? And, in this case, what will be the “cruise speed” to achieve that range?
2: What will be the top speed of the boat?
3: We all know these boats will not be equipped with torpedoes, but, how about decoys? Can the boat hide itself under the cover of decoys?
I think not many has an answer at this moment. But, just curious.
I would imagine that the ‘cruise’ speed is probably in the region of 3-4 knots max(Boeing’s Orca is 3kts to get it’s range). Not sure about it’s top speed, as there is a large price to pay if you drive around faster. It will cost you range/endurance, as there is no indications that it can recharge it’s batteries, then is top speed is somewhat irrelevant at the minute!
Very useful that it can hide, I mean be transported, in an ISO container on its way to ‘inspect’ an undersea cable. 🥸
Perhaps they need to work on an inflatable version……
Ha Ha.
At a cruising speed of 5 knots it would take 174 hours to go 870 nm. Submersed submarines going slow have very little drag and create little turbulence so such a craft might well achieve 5 kt with a 3 kW 4 hp) dive so the battery capacity would be 174 x 3 = 522 kWh which is the equivalent of 10 Tesla car batteries whilst the Rolls Royce ACCEL electric aircraft has an electric battery of capacity 216 kWh.
So a range of “1000” miles might be feasible.
If it isn’t running against a current.
AC or DC ?
Don’t be stupid.
I think you mean “Don’t be Silly” as it was obviously a funny retort ? a bit like your own “Inflatable” comment which I found really funny.
The first rule is never fire back
I thought it was a clever old response considering these are electric boats.
A range of 1000km indicates a ‘radius’ of 500km to go out and come back.
I dont know if the numbers are for without reserves and as a theoretical number ( hasnt been tested yet), so could mean a round 400km radius
Diving deep means it still needs some energy used to both descend and ascend ( doesnt seem to use buoyancy tanks ?) while not travelling far horizontally.
This reduces radius again
These theoretical max ranges are seldom achieved in any EV and there is the added risk of unforseen events, so your400km radius figure is more likely.
It’s also irrelevant as the ocean it’s in moves.
Currents are ‘usually’ very low in open oceans and they are below the surface zone too where they are strongest
Just to note there is a big difference between nautical miles and km implied in replies to this post – one nm = 1.85 km or thereabouts. Also suspect that if towed array is deployable (at some stage) these units will be dropped off to loiter and monitor a specific area – so may just need to expend power to retain position giving them ability to loiter for longer periods. 2 or 3 operating in the Greenland Iceland gap and feeding intel to type 23 taps and p8 could be very effective. One loitering of Gibraltar and another off coast of Denmark and life gets very difficult for russian submariners.
Remember, temperature has a big impact on batteries too- those subs off the coast of Greenland won’t be going as far as the one hanging around Gibraltar- unless there’s a lot of thermal insulation involved as well.
Tesla batteries are 100kWh+
So more like 5 batteries?
A single Tesla powerwall unit is 13.5kWhr. Like all these sorts of batteries it is a collection ( 900) of much much smaller actual battery cells plus coolant and packing and the power controls.
In other ways the low continuous current drawdown in this sub is compatible to the Powerwall design ( but not for electric car batteries) and the underwater use is a big help for cooling.
It is a collection or a battery of cells. That’s from where the word battery comes. It is a battery of cells.
‘the infliction of unlawful personal violence on another person, even where the contact does no physical harm’
This is obviously the future and you wonder if it makes sense for Australia to head in the direction of nuclear, which will take forever and cost billions if it ever actually happens. Surely they should invest in developing things along these lines so they aren’t caught out with an unachievable project, but leapfrog towards the future now.
It’s a 17 ton vessel, are you suggesting the Aussies buy these instead of the 7000 ton nuclear attack boats ?
Yes, 700 uwav =$14billion so about the same purchase cost, but a fraction of the maintenance, operation and deployment costs. Also much more adaptable to multi role, expendible and spreadable, so less critical if one or 10 get taken out.
And critically, should they be shot in the water we wouldn’t necessarily need to regards it as an act of war (as a sub sinking would be) which maybe very advantageous for timing or political purposes.
The first destroyers ( original name torpedo boat destroyers) were very small and light too, about 400 tons
this is Furor, from the very first class built in Scotland for Spanish Navy in 1896
Your assumption that 700 XLUUV is equivalent to say 7 nuclear subs is a common mistake of quantity over capability
Really ? Have you any Idea about the capabilities of these tiny boats in comparison to say an Astute ? minor things like speed, payload, endurance, effective firepower, special operations forces insertions, Hunter Killer capability, those sort of things ?
I’m afraid you are proposing to buy 10000 Cessna small air planes equipped with autonomous flight software in place of 100 Typhoon. Or 10000 rover mini equipped with autopilot to replace the 100 Challenger II MBT.
Great.
Having both, mixing their capability it surely an answer. But, not replacement, I think.
Putin is buying thousands of Iranian drones at $20k a pop and has used them to overwhelm Ukraine’s air defences and devastate the infrastructure. As opposed to expending the few high-end Kalibrs and Iskanders he has left. “10,000 Cessnas” would do pretty much the same against any modern country’s air defence system.
Rise of the Drones.
Ha, I dared to mention something similar on here yesterday. Worms were mentioned, for the life of me I can’t imagine why though.
A 1T byte micro SD card (11 x 15 mm) can store some 40000 digital photos of 4K quality or 4000 digital videos of 4K quality for one hour each. Some worms, some robotics, and some AI.
Interestingly a Worm is actually a pretty clever beastie and you need a massive amount of commuting power to come close to worm level decision making.
They tried that 75 years with the mass launches of V1 and V2
The difference is these are not designed to attack anything let alone compare to a hunter killer submarine.
with the Iranian drones you using the wrong analogy, the drones only work because they are being used against fixed Large soft targets ….what would happen if you tried to use a 1000 of those drones to shoot down a fourth of generation fighter……nothing as they would not be capable of engaging the fighter..it’s the same with these they have a purpose but beyond that purpose they cannot be used….send 100 men armed with knives against an armoured fighting vehicle and it’s a pretty obvious outcome, send 2 men with A couple of NLAWs and the outcome is completely different….no number of knives will replace an NLAW, no number of these would replace a hunter killer in the middle of the Pacific looking for warships to kill.
All your post says to me is that you have utterly no understanding of submarines, submarine warfare, robotics, or AI.
You are an Analog guy in a Digital world. Building sandcastles by the sea of memories. Only for the waves of time to wash them away.
What would you have them do? Maybe 500 missions running in parallel, with a couple of hundred undergoing maintenance at any time? Australia are looking at 8 nuclear subs. So 4,000 parallel missions to keep track of and 1,600 undergoing maintenance? The infrastructure to run them all, programme them, debrief, analyse, cleaning and recharge them, etc. would be almost as eyewatering as for nuclear. Who would prep the payloads, and how much would those cost? The number of humans needed to run an “autonomous” unit is definitely not zero. If your numbers were right (and they aren’t), you’d need to double the size of the RAN just to cope with them all.
The real kicker is that not one of them would be capable of sinking an enemy vessel, which is kind of the point of an attack submarine.
having hundreds of unwater sensors working automatically is called sosus
Even for frigates and submarines the long underwater towed sonar arrays have solved the triangulation problem which would have once needed multiple vessels to report a location of a contact to solve it in 2D.
They are completely different things, this is a local sensor platform, it’s effectively bound to where you place it with a bit of local mobility. A nuclear submarine has strategic mobility allowing it to go anywhere at a constant high speed. It’s in-fact the most strategically mobile of all navel platforms.
This sort of system would always be bound to either a tender of some description or to a specific geography…it’s good to have and if you have lots of ships that can cart around containers in mission bays ( like the RN will have) it’s a good capability that can be added to a ship.
They will never replace a hunter killer submarine as it’s needs speed and mobility as well as lots of weapons…but you you could see some changes in operations coming from this around some ASW functions.. but also it’s limitations could create some complex evolutions….you could see a future where something like a type 31 dashes ahead of a task group, drops one of these off to sniffer around a bit of ocean that the task groups is going through, then it gets picked up by a trailing ship/tender recharges ready to be transported to the next bit of ocean.
Exactly what purpose does this actually serve?
The stated requirements are:
To build trust in long endurance autonomous underwater operations
Act as an adaptable testbed for AUV mission payloads
Manta was tested with with a thin-line towed array sonar, so sub detection might be on the cards. Also the US equivalent is supposed to be used for deploying mines. I don’t think we do much of that, do we?
TAS I can see being pretty valuable, although given the sub’s presumed speed I presume this being a “tripwire” in the GIUK gap, or the approaches to Faslane rather than a hunting pack with a T26.
No idea if we drop a lot of mines- I’m honestly not sure where we’d put them? Potentially dropping something under the hull of a berthed enemy combattant in Sevastopol, I bet Ukraine would be intersted in that kind of capability. I can see them putting ELINT listening devices in, maybe covert insertion/drop off of equipment in littoral areas to prepare for SOF/amphibious landings? If you could get the speed up to where they can keep up with a CVG, then they become much more potent, but I reckon that’s at least a few design iterations away.
We don’t do mines anymore Joe, we dropped that requirement ages ago, too indiscriminate a killer, same with cluster munitions. Then we went all precision, things got v expensive mate.
Ah, always the way..!
If we put a dirty great big explosive directly under a specific moored ship though, that would be pretty discriminating. Closer to the original meaning of the word mine, to a certain extent? Or is it not some thing RN is interested in, because it doesn’t have any advanced guidance systems and a man-in-the-loop option?!
Our SMs (SSN/SSK) always had the ability to lay mines, they were withdrawn a good decade ago. If I remember correctly, it’s got something to do with some treaty or another, the army also lost their mine laying capability and scatterable sub munitions also went.
It’s interesting as all in all stonefish is a pretty clever mine that was not that random at all. We do still make them in the U.K. and export them as Australia is still a user and maintains war stocks and training stocks.
I don’t think there is any treaty that would prevent the RN from holding stocks of navel mines, it’s land mines that are really covered under international treaty. UNCLOS does having some restrictions on mine laying in international waters and straits during peacetime but keeps pretty quite about wartime use of navel mine warfare.
I always thought the reason we got rid of our mines was the fact they were all ancient MK5 and MK12 mines that were getting to the end of their shelf life in the early 1992s and after the end of the Cold War we could not be arsed to buy a new mine like stonefish as we had no real use.
Wont be ‘under a specific moored ship’. Its more likely to be a shipping channel to a strategic port , such as where SLBM transit
Sorry, I had in mind a “21st Century Cockleshell Heroes”, with one of these going under a key target (flagship of the Rusiian Black Sea Fleet, for example) while it’s berthed. Then it could lay a major charge, pull back to a safe distance, and watch as the explosive breaks the ships back.
But yes, controlling transit routes would be a less-specific-to-Ukraine application!
Oh……….If you mean ‘we’ as the RN then yes. But most of the rest world does……
Just this last week Naval News had this article……..
https://www.navalnews.com/naval-news/2022/12/mine-laying-capability-for-all-navies-by-sh-defence/
Some navies have minelayers…….
These are from South Korea……
These are Polish…….
And one of the reasons for having SSK’s is mine laying.
Yes, we as in the RN, Army and RAF. Am aware other nations take a different view on such issues, personally I think it is a mistake not to have the capability. But then again I don’t make policy either.
Does anyone know whether CETUS would fit in one of the Type 31 boat bays? Originally the T31 was to have 4x 9.5m bays, but I think that was reduced to three boat bays, hopefully making one of them longer. At 12 or 15m the AUV is getting rather sizable.
I know it should be able to fit in the mission bay (without the insert), but that doesn’t seem ideal for ASW patrol work.
I don’t know about the boat bays. But, if the T31’s mission bay is like the T26’s one, then it should have a self-launching capability up to a fairly significant weight.
Sea level Rise, is one possible answer, 17 tons of extra displacement, I know it’s not much but it does add to the climatic problems.
Why not called it a fully automated vessel, woke at its worst naming it an uncrewed submarine.
Maybe it can be named HMS LBGT+
I don’t see what’s so woke about ‘uncrewed submarine’ over ‘fully automated vessel’
Thats right . The airborne drones do have ‘aircrew’ or pilots , just not on board.
I think this cant really be fully autonomous , just given a preloaded movements before it sinks beneath the waves
uncrewed is the new unmaned.
Ah, thank you.
Tbh the only one that bothers me is ‘warfighter’.
I guess Ships being referred to as “She” might be a future issue too ?
Who decides on ships preferred pronouns? The Lady Patron? Oh no, can’t have one of those either any more. Equal bottle smashing opportunities for men! (Er, I mean for Y-chromosomally-endowed people who choose to identify as such. I think.)
It’s historical, goes back centuries and way before people realised just how offended they could be by such talk.
be great if one of those payload sections was for sub rescue or frogmen/ladies.
the ‘man’ suffix used to be for both genders or ‘a person’ in middle and old english . The gendered terms were ‘wyfeman’ and ‘wereman’ ( some other spellings)
Thats why words such as chairman and frogman can be for both genders
Sci Fi comes to the underwater team. Not going to get paired up with the big boats at that speed or range but could be useful on the new underwater protection units if they ever appear?
Can the payload section carry frogmen? I don’t see how the LRG’s ‘raiding’ role make any sense whatsoever in anything beyond taking on pirates and drug smugglers without the ability to first deliver troops covertly.
Its really an open ocean underwater vessel. The navigation is too challenging anywhere near coastlines
How comes an Astute can navigate close enough to shore to justify carrying a divers capsule but an electronic mini-sub can’t?
Wave action, fishing tackle? thing is, a 7000 ton Astute would be nowhere near the coastline at all, well not in the way you are asking.
Thats right . They have highly trained crew on board to evaluate its sensors as well. The XLUUWV has no one. Its not at all like an airborne drone which has digital communication/ contact and optical sensors
Another question is, could an Astute carry one piggy-back style? Or at least re-charge one at sea?
Interestingly, you could probably fit that in the back of a A400M.
90% of the cost of a submarine is the hull. Not weapons. Not sensors. Just the thing that floats (or sinks) and moves it.
That’s rather a simplistic way of putting it to say the least. The Cost’s involved developing the Weapons, their integration and Sensors is enormous in comparison. just look at the cost’s of Trident.
Hello, new here, came to this site after being recommended by someone on another similar site, have to say it’s a great site from what I can see, hope to be able to add something of interest or help every now and again. Cheers everyone, Phil.
Cheers, but be careful!
They could include solar panels to recharge the batteries. The sub wouldn’t need to surface as you can get decent light levels down to 10-20 meters depth, especially in clearer water. If it’s a longer deployment the sub could just hang in position for a few hours, recharge, and continue it’s mission.