Today’s submarines satisfy multiple roles in one hull but, in the future, the Royal Navy envisions operating a family of submarines, of varying shapes and sizes, manned and unmanned, fulfilling a wide variety of operational tasks.
The RN challenged a team of young engineers from UKNEST to develop futuristic submarine concepts through a “visioneering” workshop. This identified a range of solutions that included crewed motherships with whale shark/manta ray characteristics, unmanned eels ejecting autonomous sensor pods which dissolve on mission completion and swarms of mini-UUV “flying fish”.