UK minister drives STARK's missile-armed Vanta 12 drone boat in Oslo

At a demonstration in Oslo this week, UK defence readiness and industry minister Luke Pollard personally operated STARK's Vanta 12, a 12-metre uncrewed boat carrying Sea Venom anti-ship missiles, The Defence Blog reports, citing a company release. Pollard was in Oslo for a Joint Expeditionary Force gathering of northern European militaries led by Britain.

"With the next generation of crewed platforms being built, we're investing in the next generation of uncrewed platforms today," Pollard said. The boat was built in Dartmouth, Devon, and developed and tested in Plymouth, where Pollard is the local MP. It carries up to 2 tonnes of payload, including MBDA's Sea Venom, the missile the Royal Navy fires from its Wildcat helicopters.

STARK pitches the boat for shadowing suspect tankers in the Baltic, the Channel and the North Sea and for guarding undersea cables. The release said the Vanta 12 is already exported to NATO allies from South-West shipyards, and that the first Plymouth-built Vanta 6 went to the German Navy in September as "the first uncrewed surface vessel taken into service by the German armed forces."

That claim does not fully match earlier reporting: in August, Resilience Media reported that the first six-metre boat for Germany, the Vanta-based Seetaube, was delivered to the Bundeswehr's Cyber and Information Domain Service, with Germany not yet taking it into service. The Defence Blog has asked STARK to clarify.