Royal Navy ‘Special Purpose Vessel’ to arrive next month
A new 500-tonne ‘Special Purpose Vessel’ will arrive in Portsmouth next month to be prepared for her role as a trials platform.
Kevan Jones, MP for North Durham, asked:
“To ask the Secretary of State for Defence, when the Special Purpose Vessel is expected to be operational.”
Jeremy Quin, Minister of State at the Ministry of Defence, responded:
“The Special Purpose Vessel is currently scheduled to arrive in Portsmouth in late July 2022. She will then be prepared for her role as a trials platform.”
As I reported previously, the vessel of around 500 tonnes will be procured through a £9m contract and will support trials for “autonomy development”.
The contract specifications describe a steel vessel with a draught of 3.5m, top speed of 20 knots, a range of 2500 nautical miles, a crew of 6 and with the ability to tow small boats such as RHIBs.
In addition, the vessel is expected to have a crane and a working deck able to accommodate 2×40 foot ISO containers or 2x 20-foot ISO containers.
While the vessel will also be expected to be autonomous in future, the contract specification makes clear that the functional integration of technology provided to enable the autonomous behaviours of the platform are excluded from this current contract but that the contractor should support the physical integration of this equipment in future.
The statement of requirements are relatively vague but do state that NavyX (that’s the part of the Royal Navy that typically deals with experimental projects like this) require a small ‘Fast Crew Vessel’ style ship to serve as a testbed and trials ship for the Royal Navy.
The vessel is expected to be transferred to the Royal Navy by the 31st of March 2022.
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https://ukdefencejournal.org.uk/royal-n ... D0LF9e0Udg