The U.S. Navy Wants To Fill Its Fleet With Robo-Ships.....

[MMC]

• DARPA is working with the U.S. Navy to create a class of ships that would be completely unmanned.
  
  
• If successful, it would represent a ten year leap over the current pace of technological development.
  
• The Navy is still working on a separate project to develop optionally, or lightly manned warships.

The U.S. Navy is teaming up with DARPA to develop autonomous, robotic ships that are completely human free. The NOMARS (No Mariners Required Ship) concept, if successful, would be a huge leap over current unmanned surface vessel development efforts. The result could be a warship able to do the tedious, dangerous, and dirty jobs all by itself, keeping human-crewed ships safe from harm—and boredom.


The Navy, struggling to grow the fleet on a flat defense budget, is making a big push into unmanned surface vessels, or USVs. The Navy plans to build ten Large Unmanned Surface Vehicle ships, 200 to 300 foot long vessels displacing 2,000 tons, in five years. LUSV would act as a scout, sailing ahead of the fleet to detect threats early, or floating magazine, carrying a large load of missiles. LUSV would ideally be autonomous, or optionally manned with a small crew.


NOMARS is a separate, parallel effort to develop an entirely autonomous ship. While LUSV is based on existing ship designs and will have built-in accommodations for humans, NOMARS will be an unmanned ship from the ground up. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) told C4ISRNet that the project will take what the Navy wants to do with the ship, hull size requirements, and other factors and try to make a ship out of it......snip~


https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news...130000677.html

[Lummy]

With a view to eventually having entire fleets of unmanned ships ... battling other fleets of other unmanned ships.

Sounds like a slaughter of taxpayers, but might make for great abc sports Sunday afternoon viewing.

[MMC]

With a view to eventually having entire fleets of unmanned ships ... battling other fleets of other unmanned ships.

Sounds like a slaughter of taxpayers, but might make for great abc sports Sunday afternoon viewing.

We need them anyways. Plus being cheaper to build, works.

[usaf81]

Even more important will be the drone mine defense ships. Mines are a very real threat and one where we are vulnerable. Already Boeing has a contract for the Orca drone which will have a variety of capabilities including finding mines and disabling them. It will have mission modules for payloads and will even have a strike capability, torpedos and missiles, will be able to dive very deep, be very quiet, have a range of 7,500 nm+. https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zon...mines-and-more