M Ship Co.’s vessel is the largest vessel ever built in the U.S. solely of carbon fiber, for reduced weight and increased stiffness. It will be delivered to the U.S. military Office of Force Transformation to establish scalability of the M hull technology and is the prototype of a family of vessels to qualify for the full range of missions contemplated for operations in littoral zones (i.e., military combat in and near shallow water depths). These will offer significant advantages over conventional displacement crafts or planning crafts (with a shallower draft that plane for a faster, less stable ride), based on the U.S. military’s new littoral missions where efficiency, low cost, innovation, higher payload fraction, agility, shock mitigation, shallow draft, and stealth are the new priorities for the next generation naval craft.
