Minimal Viable Warship Conference 2025

Our “Minimum Viable Warship” conference at Make UK‘s Engineer’s House in Bristol was opened by the S&T Working Group co-Chair Jake Rigby from BMT. The proceedings kicked off with an exceptional Keynote Address from Captain Mohayed Magzoub Royal Navy, Head of Force Development. He introduced the future Hybrid Navy as a “force mix that can deliver the navy’s outputs using disaggregated Sense, Decide and Effect across connected hosts,” describing it as having “a Common Combat Vessel at its heart with associated uncrewed capabilities.” He was followed by Professor David Andrews, who provided historical context and expounded the importance of exploring numerous solutions as we “shift the paradigm from designing warships to designing fleets.” This set the scene for an absorbing day of presentations and discussions from almost 100 delegates.

Three sessions followed for our “Minimum Viable Warship” agenda at this year’s S&T Conference. John Voyce OBE from GE Vernova and James Schofield from SURVIVABILITY CONSULTING LIMITED attempted to frame our understanding of “minimum viable” from the perspectives of increasing electrical power demand and vulnerability considerations. After lunch, the focus was Modularity, with Chloe Yarrien from BMT, presenting the family of MODUS autonomous hullforms, Paul Keating-Brown from Force Development Services (FDS) Ltd elucidating the challenging in designing and integrating modular systems that are “complex platforms in their own right,” and Andy Higgins from QinetiQ, who challenged us to think whether it is “the warship that needs to be minimum viable or the process” to get us there. The final session “How do we get there” discussed the realities of accelerating capability and scaling manufacturing with presentations from David Paul CEng from Frazer-Nash Consultancy, Simon Davies from Saronic Technologies and Bertie Ratsey from ZeroUSV. The conference was summarised brilliantly by S&T Working Group co-Chair, Stephanie Miller. We are immensely grateful to all speakers, contributors and delegates for a most enlightening day.