Royal Australian Navy Discussions and Updates 2.0
- Thread starter OPSSG
- Start date
I wonder if “swappable” batteries might be a capability they are pursuing? Something like using a submarine tender, lift the Ghostshark out, swap batteries and off it goes with it’s full range intact.Yea OK, wrong term to use, however drag will be a problem for a hull of this shape. It's shape is not made to be speedy.
From what I've read they don't have any internal recharging, however that would either be a large fuel tank or a trickle charge solar panel. Neither would be advantageous.
I would have thought however a ghost shark could be picked up by an offshore supply platform near its station, recharged on a flat deck cradle, given a scrub and then plonked back in a few hours later. If it had a payload then this could also be replenished or swapped at the same time.
A small number of such vessels could easily keep a large fleet of ghost sharks permanently on patrol
Don’t even bother trying to make the vessel able to recharge, just the battery module and swap it out when necessary and it recharges on the tender?
Then it is just a logistical exercise of how many battery modules and payloads do you need to support how many Ghostsharks for how long a mission duration you envisage…
Could also work.I wonder if “swappable” batteries might be a capability they are pursuing? Something like using a submarine tender, lift the Ghostshark out, swap batteries and off it goes with it’s full range intact.
Don’t even bother trying to make the vessel able to recharge, just the battery module and swap it out when necessary and it recharges on the tender?
Then it is just a logistical exercise of how many battery modules and payloads do you need to support how many Ghostsharks for how long a mission duration you envisage…
A battery to provide the range stated will be large, something in the order of a MWh (two tesla truck batteries), possibly more. I'm thinking it might extend the length of the payload bay and perhaps the bottom third. This would be heavy, around 6-8 tonnes.
Some truck chargers are able to do around 500kw (which os a medium sized genset), so 2-3 hour turn around time, either charging the drone directly or charging spare batteries to swap out.