Impact of unmanned vehicles on naval ship design

This paper considers the impact of employing modern, sophisticated, unmanned vehicles on naval warships. The paper briefly reviews the different types of exisitng unmanned vehicles and how these are launched and recovered. Following this the main issues, opportunities and constraints that these vehicles have on the naval ship design process are discussed. To illustrate the issues clearly the conceptual design of a Littoral Multi-Mission Ship (LMS) able to deploy a range of unmanned technologies is presented. The LMS can be considered as a natural extension to the littoral combat ship (LCS) since the LMS has similar mission requirements to the LCS.