Splash Industries has fitted its 11-foot Typhoon uncrewed surface vessel with a module that launches one-way attack drones from the deck at the press of a button. The Inglewood, California, company calls it the Airstrike Pack, and says it has already run the system in a force-on-force exercise.

That is the whole of what Splash has disclosed. The announcement does not say how many drones the pack holds, which drones they are, or how far they fly. Interesting Engineering’s headline calls it a swarm. Nothing Splash has published supports that word, and nothing rules it out.

The timing is the interesting part. Six weeks ago a boat of the same design drove itself into the flooded well deck of an amphibious assault ship during the Rim of the Pacific exercise. Now it has a weapon on its back, and a U.S. Navy whose own drone-boat tests produced a collision last year has one more small vendor to sort.

Splash Built a Push-Button Launcher Onto a Modular Deck

The Airstrike Pack is a payload module for the Typhoon’s configurable deck, the same mounting that carries cargo or sensors. Operators trigger the launch from Splash C2, the company’s own command-and-control software. Splash announced the module on Monday, August 24, and Defence Blog carried the statement two days later.

The company credits its in-house electronics and software for the module’s ruggedness and cost, and says the design gives it “a tenth of the price of our nearest competitor.” The announcement, as carried by Defence Blog and Interesting Engineering, attaches no dollar figure to that claim and names no competitor.

Splash says the module was tested during a force-on-force exercise. It has not said where, when, or with whom, and neither outlet reporting the announcement had those details.

The Typhoon Runs 600 Nautical Miles at 50 Knots on Splash’s Numbers

Splash rates the Typhoon at more than 600 nautical miles (690 miles, 1,111 kilometers) of range and a sustained speed above 50 knots (58 mph, 93 km/h), with runs past 70 knots (81 mph, 130 km/h) in testing. Those are company figures. The hull is 11 feet (3.4 meters) long.

Speed is the selling point for a drone launcher. A 50-knot boat carries its aircraft toward a target far faster than the aircraft would get there on their own battery, and it can leave before anyone shoots back. Small one-way attack drones typically trade range for cost, so a fast mothership widens the circle they can reach.

Splash also says the Typhoon assembles in eight hours and sells for about a tenth of the price of comparable systems, and that its vessels have logged more than 10,000 nautical miles (11,500 miles, 18,520 kilometers) of autonomous deployments on three continents. The company came out of stealth in July with a $4.2 million round led by Ubiquity Ventures. CEO Ivan Avanesov says a larger vessel, the Tempest, is being prepared for Navy testing with a 1,500-pound (680-kilogram) payload and 300 nautical miles (345 miles, 556 kilometers) of range.

RIMPAC Showed the Boat Can Find a Moving Warship on Its Own

In July a Typhoon delivered parts to the USS Essex (LHD 2) during RIMPAC near Hawaii, in what Splash described as the first fully autonomous underway resupply of a U.S. Navy warship. The boat crossed the ship’s wake and entered its flooded well deck with no radio or satellite command.

The Naval Postgraduate School’s Consortium for Advanced Manufacturing Research and Education oversaw the demonstration. Within the same 24 hours, a Typhoon carried uncrewed aircraft components that Marines had manufactured aboard the Essex back to shore, according to the consortium’s statement as reported by Defence Blog. Naval News reported the well-deck landing on July 16 from video that Avanesov posted.

That demonstration matters more for the Airstrike Pack than the exercise it was tested in. A boat that can navigate a warship’s wake without a link can also carry a drone launcher into contested water where the link is jammed, which is where a one-way attack drone earns its keep. The Navy’s own drone-boat effort has had a rougher time: in August 2025 DroneXL covered collisions, software stalls and a paused L3Harris autonomy contract during Navy tests off California. Splash was not among the vendors named in that reporting.

Ukraine Put Drones on Drone Boats First

Ukraine’s military intelligence agency has run uncrewed surface vessels as drone motherships since 2025. When DroneXL covered the Magura V7 in June 2025, the 24-foot boat was already launching explosive quadcopters for coastal strikes alongside its air-to-air missiles, and had shot down two Russian Su-30s.

That is the combat record the Airstrike Pack is chasing, on a hull less than half the length. The U.S. side is arriving with money rather than combat experience. The Pentagon’s Drone Dominance Program, which DroneXL reported in December 2025, is buying toward an inventory of about 340,000 small one-way attack drones by early 2028. Every one of them needs a way to get to the target. A boat that carries them there for a tenth of the cost of the alternative, if the claim holds, is a bid for a slice of that program.

The larger American USV makers are already in the water. Saronic’s 24-foot Corsair has a $392 million Navy production contract, and in June a Task Force 59 Corsair pulled two Apache crew members out of the water near the Strait of Hormuz. Splash’s Typhoon is smaller, faster on paper, and, by its own account, much cheaper. Its combat record is a force-on-force exercise the company won’t describe.

DroneXL’s Take

I like this boat. An 11-foot hull that drives itself into a well deck and now launches kamikaze drones is the cheap, disposable mass the Navy’s drone-boat program was supposed to produce and mostly hasn’t. If Splash’s price claim is real, it is the bigger number here, not the drones.

But I’m not going to call it a swarm launcher, because Splash hasn’t. The announcement names no drone and no count. “A tenth of the price of our nearest competitor” is a sentence with two blanks in it. A company that just raised $4.2 million and is pitching the Navy has every reason to say more, and the fact that it hasn’t yet is the open question here: is the pack integrated with a specific one-way attack drone, or is it a launch rail waiting for a customer to pick one? The Drone Dominance Program is buying drones by the hundred thousand. Whichever drone the launcher is built around decides how useful it is.

Ukraine settled the concept more than a year ago. The Magura V7 was launching quadcopters from a drone boat while American programs were still colliding in test. So the question for Splash is not whether a robot boat can carry attack drones. It can. The question is whether an American startup can make one cheap enough to lose, and whether the Navy will buy it before it buys something bigger and slower. Watch for whether the Tempest’s Navy testing produces a dated contract announcement, and whether Splash ever names the drone that goes in the box.

Sources: Interesting Engineering, Defence Blog, Naval News

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.