China is readying the world's first giant submarine UAV carrier — built with a 1115ft dock, the unnamed mothership could be longer (and bigger) than WW2 light aircraft carriers and carry 148ft underwater drones
- Satellite imagery shows China building a roughly ~200m ship in Shanghai that analysts say is a mothership for submarine-sized drones
- It pairs a bottom-opening well-deck and 12-arm cradle with an internal hangar that experts estimate holds four 115- to 148ft XXLUUVs
- While the ship itself is shorter than an Essex-class carrier, its dock clocks in at about 1,115ft
China appears to be building a type of ship no navy is publicly known to operate: a large surface vessel designed to carry, launch, and recover uncrewed submarines the size of conventional crewed boats
The hull was first posted on September 13 2026 by Japanese open-source analyst KAROTASU and assessed two days later by H I Sutton at Naval News.
It currently sits at a dock at the Hudong-Zhonghua shipyard in Shanghai, and Beijing has yet to formally acknowledge its existence, so it has no name, list of capabilities, or the...
Copyright of this story solely belongs to www.techradar.com. To see the full text click HERE
