Skip back 100 years and the world of warfare today looks almost unrecognisable. You'd think that would make predicting what military vehicles will look like in the future nigh-on impossible, but Britain's Royal Navy has other ideas.

Its Nautilus 100 imagines the submarines and micro-drones that will be patrolling our oceans in 50 years. The work was commissioned in honour of the USS Nautilus, the world's first operational nuclear submarine.

"The underwater battle space is a hugely challenging environment and it's predicted to remain so for a long time yet," says Peter Pipkin, the Royal Navy's fleet robotics officer. He continues to say the vehicles used in the future will be more autonomous and make use of other technologies still in development.


While they'll never be created, the concepts were designed to operate in the same way as marine animals move through the water. The designs comprise a main ship and several autonomous vehicles that can be launched from it.

"Operating in the underwater space is incredibly difficult, just sharing communications is difficult," Pipkin says. "Using a family of vehicles, or a swarm of unmanned underwater vehicles, can extend that communications range and create networks that form themselves."

Update: 29/08/2017: This article has been corrected to remove an inaccurate date reference for the USS Nautilus. It was launched in 1954.