Navy milestone: Ukrainian naval drone sinks Russian kamikaze drone boat

In the world’s first conflict of the drone boats, a Ukrainian naval drone destroyed a Russian explosive drone boat utilizing a remote-controlled machine gun turret. This comes because the conflict in Ukraine has already seen widespread deployment of such uncrewed floor vessels in fight, together with swarms of flying assault drones and floor robots.

The lopsided battle happened on September 12 when members of Ukraine’s Defense Intelligence detected the Russian uncrewed floor vessel (USV) within the Black Sea and directed a Ukrainian Navy drone boat to intercept. The Russian vessel was “positively identified” as an Orcan floor drone with a “jet ski type steerable water jet” designed to ram targets and explode, in accordance with naval analyst HI Sutton in Naval News.

Such Orcan drones have already been used to assault Ukrainian ports and ships. These usually work in coordination with flying drones similar to Russian Geran drones that present aerial reconnaissance and might enhance communication between drone operators and drone boats, Sutton defined.

In this case, the Russian drone was hunted down by a Ukrainian Sargan-3000 drone boat armed with a 12.7 mm machine gun mounted on a distant weapon station made by the Norwegian firm Kongsberg.

“It was inevitable that there would be USV-on-USV combat,” Sutton told New Scientist. “We have seen the same in the air and on the ground.”

The Ukrainian Navy released a video exhibiting the Sargan-3000 firing upon the Russian drone from a distance of 1 kilometer, disabling the latter’s communications antenna earlier than riddling the Russian drone till it sank, in accordance with the Ukrainian government media platform United24.