SOF Week 2025: Kraken Technology group debuts K3 Scout USV in North America

Already in full production at two manufacturing facilities in the UK, the K3 Scout is already under order for an undisclosed NATO customer. More than 100 USVs are scheduled to be manufactured in 2025, a company official informed Shephard.

The development of the USV comes at a time when armed forces across the Western alliance are seeking to replicate efforts by the armed forces of Ukraine, who continue to use USVs to successfully target and strike Russian navy vessels in the Black Sea. One recent example: On May 2, a Ukrainian “Magura” USV shot down a Russian Su-30 jet over the eastern Black Sea.

According to a Kraken statement, the K3 Scout is a “modular, rapidly scalable maritime capa-bility built for today’s complex naval environments”.

At SOF Week, the company conducted live demonstrations of the K3 Scout in Tampa’s Garrison Channel, where a Kraken official described how the USV had originally been designed as a “low-cost, one-way-attack solution”.

With a maximum range of 650 nm, the K3 Scout features an interchangeable 600-kg payload bay, enabling the craft to carry a variety of payloads. The K3 Scout aerial vehicle is available in light, medium, and heavy configurations.

The medium-sized composite variant demonstrated at SOF Week measures 8.4 m long and has a maximum displacement of 2,500 kg. Maximum speed is 55 kts - or 25 kts for the 650-nm maximum range – and the craft can remain at sea for up to 30 days, depending on the mission, company officials added.

The craft can be equipped with electro-optical, radar, and sonar payloads as well as a C5ISR [command, control, communications, computers, cyber, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance] mission module and pilot module if necessary.

The USVs feature twin-stepped hulls and are equipped with what Kraken literature describes as “high-performance diesel power trains for range and speed, and fully integrated onboard systems for reliable uncrewed capability and delivery of modular mission payloads”.

The craft can also operate in a crewed configuration and is capable of accommodating AV’s artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled HaloSwarm software for multicraft missions. Guidance in contested operating environments can also be accomplished by using AV’s GPS-denied HaloNav solution.

Speaking to Shephard, the company official described how the K3 Scout’s high speed and au-tonomy offers an “agile alternative capable of undertaking persistent missions at scale … by de-livering affordable, versatile platforms that extend the reach and resilience of naval forces”.

The company official confirmed that in February and March 2024, several K3 Scouts conducted live demonstrations in the U.K. equipped with a “mock munition.” Moreover, the official asserted that the company is considering logistics as well as counter-uncrewed system capabilities further down the road for the K3 Scout.

At SOF Week, a mockup payload bay of the K3 Scout featured AV’s Titan 4 counter-uncrewed aerial system (C-UAS) solution, which can also be used to conduct counter-USV mission sets, the official added.

Looking further down the road, the official said the company is also looking to upgrade Titan 4 with the ability to disrupt surface radio-frequency (RF) signals used to control uncrewed underwater vehicles (UUVs).