Exclusive: Blue Water picks Conrad for drone-ship production

Driving the news: Blue Water CEO Rylan Hamilton told Axios the arrangement aligns with the company's "crawl, walk, run mentality," which has thus far involved "building some of the early tech" and constructing a 145-ton test vessel outside of Boston, "where we're taking it out of the harbor and testing it out at sea."

• "With Conrad, we're going to build a true, full-scale production ship — fully autonomous, no people on board — that we designed from keel up," Hamilton said.
• "There's no space on board for sailors. There's no bridge. There's no berthing. There are no galleys. There's not even a gym."

Zoom in: Blue Water's vessel will be 150 feet long and crafted for multiple missions. Design is underway now; physical construction, what Hamilton called "welding of steel," will begin in a few months.

• "The payloads are carried in containers on the back," he said. "Think of it like the F-150 of the open ocean."

Zoom out: Louisiana is becoming a drone-boat hotspot.

• Saronic earlier this year scooped up Gulf Craft, securing 100 acres in Franklin, where it plans to build large surface vessels.

The bottom line: "The beating heart of shipbuilding is in the Gulf," Hamilton said.

• "We've looked all over the country, and we've really found that the Gulf is the place to kind of build these ships, and Conrad's the best suited to do this."

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