Saab UK and Kraken Technology Group have finished sea trials of a small uncrewed boat carrying a radar built to spot drones, and are offering the combination as a way to watch over ports and offshore installations. Putting one on the other gives the radar somewhere to stand in places where there is no land.
The vessel is Kraken's K3 Scout, a modular craft that runs without anyone aboard. The sensor is Saab's Giraffe 1X, a lightweight radar that builds a three-dimensional picture of what is flying nearby and tracks it as it moves.
Both companies emphasised how quickly it came together. "This is a pioneering, UK manufactured, deployable capability, that together with Kraken we've developed in less than seven months," said Andy Fraser, managing director of Saab UK.
Mal Crease, who founded Kraken and runs it, described the result as what the craft was built for. The K3 Scout "was designed to integrate with mission-relevant payloads to operate in austere maritime environments," he said. What they are selling it to protect is shipping, ports, offshore energy and critical national infrastructure, with the boat able to work alone or alongside crewed vessels in what the industry has started calling a hybrid navy.
Why Put A Radar On A Boat
Radar needs height and an unobstructed view, and the sea offers neither. There is nothing to build a mast on, and parking a crewed warship somewhere purely to watch the sky is an expensive use of a ship and a crew. An uncrewed hull solves the siting problem cheaply. It can hold position off a harbour approach or a wind farm for long stretches with nobody aboard, and it can be moved when the thing being protected moves.
The limit of what this does is also worth stating plainly. The system detects and tracks; it does not shoot anything down, and the step from noticing something to acting on it is where the legal questions, the engineering difficulty and most of the cost sit.
Europe's Drone Problem Has Numbers
The demand for this did not appear from a marketing exercise, and the record behind it is documented. Pilots in Germany reported 227 drone sightings during 2025, a figure that has climbed steadily since 2020, while Romania recorded more than 40 airspace incursions in the first half of this year alone.
Individual incidents give the pattern its shape. Copenhagen Airport shut for four hours in September 2025 after drones were seen. In August this year an explosive-armed quadcopter was found on a runway at Leipzig, close to an Antonov cargo aircraft.
The targets extend well past airports. The European Council on Foreign Relations has recorded repeated drone observations over French nuclear submarine bases, Belgian nuclear plants and German liquefied natural gas terminals. All of those sit on or near water.
The Economics Explain The Design
Underneath the engineering is an arithmetic problem that has shaped this entire category of product. A single missile built to bring down a drone costs between several hundred thousand and a million euros. When roughly 20 drones crossed into Poland in September 2025, the response ran to millions in fighter aircraft hours and munitions, against drones that probably cost the sender under €250,000 in total.
No defence budget survives that exchange rate for long. The response across the industry has been to separate the two halves of the problem. Detection is made cheap and persistent, while the search goes on for ways to stop a drone that cost less than the drone.
A radar on an uncrewed hull sits on the favourable side of that split. It is inexpensive to keep on station, it risks nobody, and it produces the warning that everything else depends on.
What it does not do is close the loop. Detecting a drone approaching an offshore platform tells an operator something is coming. What happens next still requires a decision, a legal basis and usually a crewed asset.
Kraken Already Had The Platform
The seven-month timeline makes more sense alongside what Kraken had already built. In March the company won Project Beehive, a £12.3M contract to supply 20 uncrewed vessels to the Royal Navy's Surface Flotilla, together with training, tactical development and warfare experimentation. That works out at a little over £600,000 a vessel, which places these craft in an entirely different bracket from anything with a crew.
"Autonomous vessels will complement our world-class warships, protecting UK waters and helping keep sailors safe," the defence minister Luke Pollard said at the time. Kraken itself is five years old, based in Fareham on the south coast of England, and backed by the NATO Innovation Fund, Britain's National Security Strategic Investment Fund and Estonia's SmartCap. It works with NATO's Task Force-X in the Baltic and with United States Special Operations Command, and has a joint venture planned with Rheinmetall Naval Systems.
So Saab was integrating a sensor onto a platform that already existed, already had a production line and already had a navy ordering it. That is a considerably easier problem than building both.
What The Trial Settles
The sea trials establish something real and narrower than the announcement implies. Running a radar from a small hull at sea is genuinely difficult, because a boat pitches and rolls in ways a fixed mast never does, and the sensor has to keep a stable picture through all of it. Demonstrating that is the point of the exercise.
What has not been published is almost everything a buyer would weigh next. Neither company has given a detection range, an endurance figure, the number of vessels it takes to cover a harbour approach, or the cost of the integrated system. Those numbers tend to arrive with a contract rather than a press release, which is also the point at which this stops being a prototype and the perimeter it is meant to watch gets measured against what it can actually see.
