TAIPEI, TAIWAN – STR8 Industries has developed Ghostwake, an unmanned surface vessel that the firm designed for operations across the first island chain and production through Taiwan’s industrial base.
“Our mission is real maritime security capability across the first island chain,” a company representative with STR8 Industries explained to Naval News. “The requirement has changed – capability now comes from large numbers of low-cost systems rather than a small number of expensive ones.”
Akin to other drone firms that have drawn lessons from Ukraine’s successful use of USVs against Russia’s conventional fleet, STR8 Industries’ Ghostwake aims to replicate similar effects in the Western Pacific. The firm also highlighted its application for civilian applications such as surveying and offshore operations.
STR8 Industries claims that Ghostwake is the “fastest USV ‘Made in Taiwan” with a speed of up to 55 knots.
“Speed isn’t a brochure number. Fast craft and unmanned platforms in this part of the world already run 40 to 45 knots. A slower vessel cannot keep pace, cannot close, and cannot get where it needs to be in time,” the representative said. Some mission sets envisioned within Ghostwake’s autonomous operations include patrol, shadowing, station-keeping on a maneuvering craft and “one-to-many supervisory control.”
Firm specifications state that the USV can be on station for seven days, operate in excess of Sea State 6 and carry payloads of 350 kilograms. Collaboration with unspecified shipyards around Kaohsiung plans for a capacity of 200 Ghostwakes per year from a single site.
Development and Future Work on Ghostwake
The drone startup has been testing its drone vessel design in the waters around Taiwan in recent months following the company’s public unveiling in June at Computex Taipei. At the tech trade show, the firm received an award for its work behind Ghostwake’s distributed processing design.
According to a company statement, the command and control system used by Ghostwake has already been proven through a “widely fielded allied tactical situational awareness application” and another C2 system from an unspecified government. Going forward, STR8 Industries is working to improve the autonomous operations and performance of the Ghostwake design through continuous testing in the water.
“The priority is data. Autonomy models improve with data, and data comes from hulls in the water doing real work, not from simulation. Every hour on every platform feeds the next software build. Deployment scale matters as much as platform performance – more hulls, more environments, defense and commercial. We’re extending that collection continuously,” the company representative said.
Ghostwake and STR8 Industries’ pitch come as Taipei seeks to invest up to $6.6 billion through a large drone program. In recent years, autonomous unmanned maritime systems have been eyed as an enabler in enhancing maritime domain awareness at a fraction of the cost of traditional platforms. Taiwanese planners hope that the mass procurement, which includes up to 1,300 USVs, will help the island counter China’s coercive activities and a potential invasion.
