Portugal's new drone carrier costs less than a tenth as much as an Arleigh Burke destroyer and can operate aerial, surface, and underwater drones.
https://www.euronews.com/2026/01/29/portugal-builds-europes-first-dedicated-drone-carrier-d-joao-ii
Discussion
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@isaackuo
Suddenly I'm reminded of Carrier Command (Rainbird, 1988) on an Amiga, where you could launch Manta drone aircraft and Walrus drone hovercraft tanks.
@swope Yeah. No pew pew laser, though.
This ship looks pretty meager in terms of sensors, and seems to have no armament of its own. I feel like that's a good tradeoff for fully committing available space for drone operation.
@nyrath It appears to lack any sort of serious air defense radar, so it would depend on at least one escort for that.
However, with sufficient sensor/fire control sharing, it would be possible to use an escort's air defense radar to track and paint targets for drones and/or missiles launched from drones to home in on.
This could be a particularly good synergy with most of Europe's warships - they've got the radar, but have limited VLS ammo.
@isaackuo @nyrath Way I see it, existing warship designs were caught wrong-footed by the sudden explosion of interest in drones, which they lack room and support for: this is a temporary fix—cheap and fast to build, small crew, use it to cover the capability gap while new primary warship designs evolve that can do drone warfare for themselves.
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@cstross @nyrath True, it may be that an optimal clean sheet navy would use warships that combine sensors (air defense, ASW) with drone armament rather than VLS.
But current navies already have ships with those expensive sensor systems. Therefore, the most expeditious way to get closer to optimal would be adding inexpensive drone platforms without the expensive sensor systems.