The Captain Who Thinks Europe Is Buying the Wrong Boats

The ship was doing everything right. She was moving at a crawl, an instrument array streaming out behind her in deep water, every machine aboard that could be shut down shut down, her crew holding her in the state she had been built for 30 years earlier: silence.

Then the phone rang on the bridge.

The chief scientist was not calm. The measurements were ruined. Nothing was working. Something aboard was making noise, and until it stopped, an expensive day of NATO science was worthless.

Olaf Steckstor was the captain, and he had no idea what was wrong. Nothing had changed. Nothing had started up. It took the rest of the day to find it.

In one of the laboratories, in a 19-inch rack of magnetic tape recorders, a small gear was faulty. It was turning at something over 12,000 revolutions per minute, and the hydrophones had picked it up from 600 meters astern, at a depth of 100 meters.

"That little thing," Steckstor said, retelling it years later. "And that ruined all of the measurements."

He tells the story now as a founder's origin story, which is what it has become, but the point he draws from it is narrower and harder than most origin stories allow. A ship is not quiet because it was designed to be quiet. A ship is quiet only as long as its worst unattended component is quiet. Everything else is intention.

The ship was NATO Research Vessel (NRV) Alliance, and she is one of the more unusual vessels afloat. NATO's Science and Technology Organization describes her as the quietest ship in her class, built specifically so that noise radiating from the hull into the water would not contaminate the acoustic research she was designed to carry.

She is 93 meters long, about 3,180 gross tonnes, constructed by Italy's Fincantieri at its Muggiano yard near La Spezia between 1985 and 1987 and delivered to NATO in April 1988. She sailed under the German flag for most of her career and transferred to the Italian naval flag in 2016. She is still working. In the spring of 2025 she passed Gibraltar, rounded Skagen, entered the Baltic, and spent time in the Bay of Gdansk at a conspicuously low transit speed, her mission undisclosed.

Steckstor spent six years aboard her, ending as her captain, after 12 years as an officer in the German Navy. He describes those two decades as the reason Ultimate Maritime Solutions exists, and specifically because of what he watched the builders and the scientists worry about.

"They needed to calculate every pipe with a liquid," he said. "The diameter, the bending radius, to avoid turbulences in the pipe, because that could create noise or vibration going into the hull, going into the water."

The ship, he said, is more than 30 years old and possibly still the quietest surface vessel in the world. During work with German Type 212 submarines, he said, the submarines could not detect her, and Alliance pinged on purpose so that they would know where she was and not run into her.

Type 212 boats use hydrogen fuel cell air independent propulsion and are widely regarded as among the quietest conventionally powered submarines ever built. Two of the quietest things in the water, in other words, feeling around for each other in the dark.

That is the world Steckstor came from, and it is the standard he says the patrol boat market has never been held to.

The resume does not read like a conventional defense founder's. Steckstor spent 12 years as an officer in the German Navy and six years aboard NRV Alliance, ending as her captain. His later career took him through commercial shipping, government vessels, and complex vessel operations, as well as selected senior roles in the large superyacht sector.

He founded A1 Superyacht Consultancy in Cyprus, which he still runs, and he is director of sales and development at Ultimate Catamarans GmbH in Germany, builder of the Spaceline range of aluminium motor catamarans.

Ultimate Maritime Solutions (UMS) is the newest thing he does and the only one aimed at governments. It is registered in Croatia, went public only weeks ago, and is developing an advanced modular maritime platform family configurable for coast guard patrol, search and rescue, mine countermeasures, anti-submarine work, special forces insertion, and disaster response.

Its approach is organized around Mission Specialist, MissionFlex, and Full Custom solutions. The company's tagline is "Designed by Seafarers," which is the kind of phrase that means nothing until somebody attaches a number to it.

Steckstor attaches a number to it. Fifty centimeters.

Asked to name one design choice on the boat that came directly from something he had lived through at sea, he went to frame spacing, which is not where a marketing department would have gone.

Transverse frames are the ribs of a ship. They carry load into the structure, and how far apart they sit is one of the first decisions a naval architect makes. Wider spacing means fewer frames, less weight, less labor, and a cheaper hull. Industry practice, Steckstor says, runs from 80 centimeters at the tightest out to 1.2 meters.

He specified 50 centimeters throughout.

"That costs a little bit more in production," he said. "But this gives me the option to bring forces into the hull, into the structure, every 50 centimeters, and therefore it is extremely modular. When the client says, put this or that, we can do it, because it is like Lego. The smaller the pieces are, the more flexible you are to build."

It is a revealing choice because it is not exotic. There is no new material, no patent, no novel geometry. It is a decision to spend more money on structure than the market spends, in exchange for a hull that can accept loads almost anywhere. Everything else UMS claims about reconfiguration rests on it.

It also, Steckstor argues, produces a stiffer hull than the alternatives, which becomes his answer later when procurement officers ask whether a boat from an unproven company will last.

The second founding decision was not to make maximum speed the dominant design criterion.

Steckstor is dismissive of the fast aluminium catamaran, and specifically of an Australian yard whose fast catamarans serve the US Navy. Very quick, he says, extremely loud, and deep in the water. He wanted the opposite: a displacement hull, quiet, with as little signature as possible in exhaust heat, noise, and vibration.

Depending on final specification, Steckstor's UMS 45, built as a displacement hull, can reach up to about 21 knots continuous top speed, while a fast displacement configuration can exceed 25 knots. Steckstor's position is that maximum speed should not come at the expense of range, efficiency, or signature reduction.

"Because in most of the cases, the ships are in a mode where they are not loud and don't create a lot of cavitation," he said. "In our times it is different than the Second World War. You have sensors all over the place, in the sky, all the satellites. I think it is much more important to be quiet."

Propulsion comes in two grades. The standard offering is what UMS calls Advanced Hybrid, combining diesel electric generation with battery support. The optional TRI-HYBRID architecture adds fuel cell capability and direct propulsion capability.

For Steckstor, the military value is not only lower fuel consumption and low signature operation, but also high redundancy: multiple energy and propulsion paths can remain available if one part of the system is unavailable. He said the partner supplying the fuel cell technology is installing more than three megawatts of fuel cell capacity on ships this year, and that the relevant marine units are certified.

That claim sits inside a real but very young market. Swedish-Swiss technology company ABB integrated a 3.2 megawatt fuel cell system aboard the 118.8 meter Feadship Breakthrough super yacht, launched in May 2024 and among the first vessels anywhere with multi megawatt fuel cell power.

ABB and Canadian fuel cell manufacturer Ballard hold approval in principle from DNV, the Norwegian classification society that sets safety and technical standards for much of the maritime industry, for a three megawatt concept. South Korea's VINSSEN announced in January that its 150 kilowatt marine fuel cell module had type approval from the Korean Register, ABS (the American Bureau of Shipping), and RINA (the Italian classification society), and described it as a building block scalable toward megawatt class propulsion.

The technology is being certified. The installed base is thin.

The operational argument Steckstor builds on top of it is the sharpest thing he says. Transit on diesel electric. On a yellow or orange alert, entering a high risk area, switch to full electric, running what he describes as submarine type propellers, and go reasonably fast without cavitation.

Steckstor describes the objective in electric mode as a very low underwater acoustic signature, with substantially reduced machinery generated vibration and thermal signature. That allows the vessel to operate in a high risk area with a significantly reduced acoustic and infrared footprint compared with conventional propulsion and hot exhaust operation.

Signature reduction is a well established naval design discipline, pursued in quiet research ships, anti-submarine frigates, and air independent submarines, and none of what he describes is physically implausible.

Steckstor is also candid that electric propulsion does not make a vessel completely invisible. Against radar, signature reduction depends on the complete vessel design. UMS can incorporate reduced radar cross section geometry and other signature management measures according to the customer's operational requirements rather than treating them as a universal baseline.

"I think that is the best you can do," he said, and then made the comparison he keeps returning to. "When I think of all these military vessels, they are all noisy. They are all having this three, 400 degrees exhaust. No one thinks about it."

The catamaran case Steckstor makes is partly about efficiency and partly about geometry.

The efficiency claim is large: up to about 70 percent lower propulsion energy at 12 knots than a monohull offering comparable usable space, depending on vessel configuration and the comparison basis.

"That is not five or ten percent," he said. "That is why we can seriously consider much greater use of electric propulsion. A conventional monohull with much higher propulsion demand needs correspondingly more stored energy for the same range." His analogy is the electric car, excellent until you hitch a trailer to it, at which point the range disappears. The monohull, in his telling, is the one towing the trailer.

Catamarans do enjoy real resistance advantages in certain speed and length regimes, and they deliver far more deck area for a given length. Whether the specific figure holds depends entirely on which monohull, at what speed, carrying what.

The geometry claim is easier to check against the physics. Two slender hulls give a draft as low as 2.3 to 2.5 meters, which lets the vessel work close inshore, put troops or rescuers on a beach without shore logistics, and carry a high speed craft in the mission deck to deploy special forces or lift survivors. Deck area is much larger than on a comparable monohull. And stability behaves differently in a way that matters operationally.

Steckstor's argument is that a catamaran generally offers substantially greater transverse stability and mission deck capacity than a comparable monohull, while the lower underwater volume means weight allocation and longitudinal trim have to be engineered carefully from the beginning. That combination, he says, is particularly useful for modular government vessels expected to carry different mission loads over their lifetime.

Then, unprompted, he listed the disadvantages.

The first is motion. A monohull moves through something close to a sine curve. A catamaran does not; the motion is sharper and quicker, and people have to adapt. Some will get seasick who would not otherwise. "That is a disadvantage," he said. "Let's call it that."

The second is buoyancy and weight. There is less underwater volume, particularly aft where the propellers are, so you cannot simply add a hundred tonnes at the stern. Monohulls carry more volume and are more forgiving about weight distribution.

"They are really sensitive to weight allocation," he said of catamarans. "That is a disadvantage. But when you know it from the beginning, and you have the weights and everything, you can plan everything in a way that it does work out."

UMS designs in smaller forward and aft tanks to trim the vessel automatically. Every client knows what the boat is for, so the weights and dimensions go into the computer and the arrangement follows. The platform underneath, he insists, does not change.

"The individual technologies are proven," he said. "Our innovation is the architecture: how we integrate them into a flexible, modular and highly redundant platform."

A platform assembled around certified, long serving components theoretically should carry less qualification risk than one built around several new technologies at once. Steckstor is not asking a defense ministry to bet on unproven components. He is asking it to assess a new system architecture built around proven technologies.

"We deliberately build on systems that are already proven and certifiable," he said. "The value is in how we bring them together into one working platform and make that platform adaptable to very different missions."

The same logic produces the part of his business he was most reluctant to discuss. One platform, he says, serves defense, hospital ship work, offshore wind support, and luxury catamarans.

"That is, we should not mention it, I guess," he said, before conceding the obvious: it is dual use. Commercially it is the whole game for a small builder, because volume across several markets keeps a production line loaded while government orders crawl. For a defense customer it raises a different question, about queue position and priority, that a first order will eventually have to settle.

MissionFlex is the claim that matters most, and the one Steckstor believes will sell the company when it becomes widely understood.

A customer specifies one primary mission and two or three secondary ones. The vessel is then built so that pre-engineered mission packages can be exchanged. For defined configurations, moving from anti-submarine warfare support to mine countermeasures, he says, can be achieved in roughly 24 to 48 hours.

He arrives at the significance through the fleet he served in. The German Navy of his day was organized into flotillas of roughly 10 boats each, and each flotilla did one thing: fast patrol boats, minehunters, minesweepers. Five such flotillas meant 50 single purpose hulls.

"With our system, you may need fewer dedicated hulls," he said. "If you need a mine countermeasures vessel today and tomorrow you have a border security or mass rescue requirement, a vessel prepared for those mission packages can be reconfigured within 24 to 48 hours. That is a big advantage for every government."

Set against procurement, the argument gets sharper. "The procurement is normally eight, nine years, up to 15 years until a vessel is delivered," he said. "But who knows what the threat is in 10, 15 years? Who knows it?" A reconfigurable boat, in his framing, is a hedge against being wrong about the future.

Modular naval platforms are an old idea with a mixed record; Denmark's StanFlex containerized system dates to the late 1980s, and the US Navy's Littoral Combat Ship mission package concept became a cautionary tale.

More to the point, Europe is already funding the same idea. Estonia leads EUROGUARD, a European Defence Fund project running to 2027 that is developing a 43 to 45 meter modular, semi autonomous surface vessel with a roughly 95 million euro budget, more than 20 companies and nine or ten participating member states.

Its prototype hull was presented at the Baltic Workboats yard in Nasva, Estonia, in May, with sea trials planned for next year. Latvia's Latitude Naval Technologies, meanwhile, is developing the LNT 27, a composite tactical catamaran, as its first program.

Steckstor knows others are moving. "I saw now a few," he said. "They start with that with monohulls. But monohulls don't have these advantages, especially stability. They really have a big problem."

His broader charge against the incumbents does not depend on that arithmetic. "All of these big companies, they are selling since decades the same ship, the same platform, with the same technology. No innovation, a little bit upgrade here and there. The equipment gets more compact, more efficient, but at the end of the day it is still the same. They sell it since 30, 40 years. And that is ridiculous."

Mine countermeasures is the mission where Steckstor's technical case is most developed, and where it aligns most closely with where NATO is already heading.

Sweeping is over, he says. Hunting is the job. His preferred method is simple and cheap: detect a ground mine with forward looking sonar, stop, hold station on dynamic positioning, deploy a one way drone carrying a small explosive charge, place it beside the mine, and initiate.

"Let it sit next to the ground mine, ping it, and the mine is gone," he said. "That can be done autonomously. You don't need crew for that."

The idea is not his, and he does not claim it is. NATO's Centre for Maritime Research and Experimentation has spent years developing exactly this approach, launching autonomous underwater vehicles from Alliance herself, containerizing them so they can be moved between ships, with the explicit goal of taking the human out of the minefield. Belgium and the Netherlands built their joint rMCM program on the same principle.

Where Steckstor adds something is the platform. Two slender hulls, he argues, create a different pressure signature from a conventional monohull. In electric mode, machinery-generated under water noise and vibration can be reduced substantially, while the shallow draft and wide mission deck make the platform well suited to deploying stand-off unmanned mine countermeasure systems. He sees that combination as particularly attractive for mine hunting missions.

"So I think our platform is exceptionally well suited to mine hunting," he said. "The aim is to reduce the vessel's signatures as far as technically practical and keep the crew outside the mine threat wherever possible."

Then the memory, which is really an argument about crew. As a German Navy officer, he served aboard the support vessel accompanying six European minehunters and a minelayer across the Atlantic to Florida, before the group worked up the coast toward Halifax. The experience left him convinced that many traditional manning models could be reduced significantly through better automation and organization.

Coast guards and rescue services across Europe are short of people at least as acutely as they are short of hulls, which makes crew size a procurement argument rather than an operating detail. Steckstor's target for certain coast guard and patrol configurations is roughly 12 to 14 crew, depending on mission, flag state, class requirements and operating doctrine. Comparable vessels, he says, often require substantially more.

The reasoning is unglamorous and mostly about what has been automated.

"Before, you could have several people on the bridge for every watch," he said. With modern integrated bridge systems and better sensor integration, Steckstor argues that many routine navigation tasks can be handled with fewer people while still meeting the applicable lookout and safe manning requirements. "A lot of traditional manning concepts are outdated," he said.

Machinery is the same story. UMS intends to design for unattended machinery space notation where required, using the redundancy, monitoring, alarm, and automation standards demanded by class and the relevant administration.

That can remove the need for a permanently manned engine control room. Cameras, sensors, automated alarms, and scheduled machinery rounds replace much of the continuous physical watch keeping. Boat handling has changed too. Modern cranes, self-releasing hooks, and better handling systems can reduce the number of people required for launch and recovery operations.

He also plans to go a step further, working with one of Europe's established market leaders in remote operation technology. The final remote control and platform management solution would be selected according to the client's operational and security requirements. Steckstor sees shore-based support particularly as a way to reduce workload during long passages and other routine operating periods rather than as a reason to eliminate the crew completely.

And then, having spent 20 minutes explaining how few people his ships need, Steckstor drew a line he clearly cares about.

"I am personally a little bit against these autonomous vehicles in a certain size," he said. "I think that is money making from the shipyards and developers at the moment, because the human factor is important. You can reduce crew to a bare minimum, without a doubt. Our ships can go autonomous. But why would you do that?"

His reason is a fire. In an engine room he was responsible for, a hairline crack opened in a high pressure pipe carrying diesel, and the result was an atomised fuel fire. Someone had to deal with it.

"Going to sea is a danger, even if it is not a military vessel," he said. "You need humans on board for a certain size of ship. Remote control, yes. When you are on a long passage, why do so many people have to be up? Let it do remote control. I think that makes much more sense than going fully autonomous."

This puts him at an angle to the market. The US Navy expects to field thousands of small uncrewed surface vessels across the Indo Pacific by 2030 and to grow its medium unmanned surface vessel fleet there from about four today to more than 30.

American GARC drone boats ran swarm exercises in the Baltic in June. EUROGUARD is explicitly semi autonomous. And Ukraine has spent four years making the uncrewed case in the most literal terms available, holding the Russian Black Sea Fleet at risk without a navy of its own, and in December striking a Kilo class submarine at its pier in Novorossiysk with an underwater drone, the first time an uncrewed underwater vehicle has hit a submarine in port.

Steckstor's position is not a rejection of any of that. His platform, he notes, can carry and launch drones of essentially any type, air or surface or subsurface, autonomously if required, and he sees the deck space as one of its strongest features.

His argument is narrower: that a crewed hull with minimal manning and a shore operator is the right answer above a certain size, and that the industry is currently selling autonomy past the point where it earns its place. Plenty of European navies are, in practice, buying exactly what he describes.

Every unproven defense supplier meets the same two questions. Will the company still be there in a decade, and who supports the boat after delivery? Steckstor's answer is that the question is aimed at the wrong risk.

Start with the equipment. Unless a client asks for something unusual, UMS specifies only components with long service records. The pumps it intends to use have been on the market for a decade and are running on hundreds of ships. "What should happen to a ship's hull?" he said. "As long as the captain doesn't run into a rock, it will be fine." And with 50 centimeter framing, he argues, it is stiffer than what else is available.

Then the objection he expects. "Someone can say, but you have never built a catamaran. True. But a shipyard can build a ship. If I want to build a house, I go to a builder who has built a hundred villas, and they all look different. Then I go with my design, and he can build it."

Then support, which is where his answer is most concrete. "Worldwide repairability," he calls it. No proprietary aluminium alloy, no components needing special tools. A pump can be repaired or replaced anywhere there are marine engineers. His illustration is domestic: he owns an older American car in Croatia and cannot buy a brake light bulb for it, because the fitting is wrong for the local market.

"We use stuff which is everywhere in the world," he said. "First we build a commercial ship, and commercial ships have to be easy to handle. They have to have redundancy. Easy to repair and maintain. Then it is adjusted to the client's wishes." The superyacht comparison follows: a superyacht has to be a good ship first, and then it is turned into a superyacht.

The customer even chooses the engines. "If the client says, I want Caterpillar, we put Caterpillar. If he says MTU, he gets MTU. I don't mind." That is possible, he explains, because there are no gearboxes coupled to shafts. The switchboard does not care where the electricity comes from. A generator can be swapped for a different make; only its placement and fitting change.

The last piece of the answer is the yard. UMS works with Iskra Shipyard in Šibenik on Croatia's Adriatic coast, an experienced European shipyard with a long track record supporting naval and government fleets and established relationships with major European defense companies.

Together with a solid network of experienced naval architects, engineers, and specialist partners, UMS can draw on the resources required from concept development through construction and systems integration.

The description matches Iskra Shipyard in Šibenik, owned by the Slovenian Iskra group. The yard has a long history of naval maintenance, repair, and newbuilding work, including extensive support for the Croatian Navy, and combines military experience with commercial shipbuilding capability.

For UMS, Steckstor argues, the significance is access to an established shipbuilding organization rather than having to create a new industrial base around the platform.

Iskra acquired the Šibenik yard in 2019 and has since expanded its shipbuilding interests in Croatia, including the 3. Maj yard in Rijeka. That broader industrial footprint gives the group access to substantially larger construction capacity than the Šibenik site alone while allowing UMS to keep its own organization comparatively lean.

Croatia is an unusually good and unusually awkward place to be making this pitch.

Croatia gives UMS access to competitive European shipbuilding costs while maintaining the quality standards expected from Northern European shipbuilding.

But Steckstor does not see UMS as tied to one yard or one country. The platform can be built at other qualified shipyards when required by the customer, subject to applicable export controls, regulations, and technology-transfer requirements. That flexibility, he argues, is particularly important for government and defense customers where domestic construction or local industrial participation may be part of the procurement strategy.

Europe's industrial politics help too. The push toward European defense industrial capacity and domestic content is precisely the environment in which a Croatian-built platform has an argument to make in a European ministry.

And then there is the arithmetic Steckstor offers, which is the boldest number in his pitch. He can build in aluminium up to 60 or 65 meters, in steel if a customer wants it, with the modular approach viable from about 30 meters up. For many patrol, surveillance, mine countermeasures, search and rescue, special operations, and selected combat support missions, he argues, a 60 to 65 meter catamaran can provide mission utility normally associated with a substantially larger monohull, with fewer crew and lower acquisition and operating cost.

"The point is not that one platform replaces every corvette," he said. "The point is that many missions do not require a full corvette all of the time. If a smaller modular vessel can cover several of those missions, a government can buy more hulls for the same budget and use them more flexibly."

That sentence lands in a country in the middle of the largest naval procurement in its history. Croatia is pursuing two multi-role corvettes, with an estimated program value between 660 million and 1.6 billion euros, and has been in discussion with as many as 12 shipyards from eight countries, among them France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, South Korea, Turkey with two yards, Spain, and the United States.

First delivery is targeted for 2029 or 2030. Domestic build content is a stated priority, which is why Fincantieri, Navantia, and Naval Group have all been signing up Croatian industrial partners.

UMS is not bidding for that. Its platform is not a corvette and Steckstor does not pretend otherwise. But the political logic that favors building corvettes partly in Croatia is the same logic that could eventually favor a Croatian platform in the tier below, and the cost comparison he draws is one that any defense ministry weighing hull numbers against unit capability will recognize.

The other number Steckstor sells is time.

Five to six months of naval architecture, he says, once a customer has defined its requirements. Construction of roughly a year and a half to two years. His target is around two to two and a half years from contract and finalized specification to delivery, assuming normal approvals and no major customer driven requirement changes. He contrasts that with waits of 5 to 10 years from major builders, and 8 to 15 years from a government's initial decision to a vessel entering service.

Then he made an accusation, and flagged it himself as something he probably should not say.

"For many patrol and support platforms, I believe the design and procurement cycle has become unnecessarily long," he said. "Our aim is to simplify the platform and shorten the part of that process we can control."

When it comes to warship design, combat system integration, survivability and shock requirements, classification, national approvals, and the sheer number of interfaces account for much of the schedule, and long programs are as often lengthened by shifting requirements and funding profiles as by anyone's commercial interest. Steckstor half concedes the point himself when he notes that final outfitting to a customer's specification always takes extra time.

He is on firmer ground about who the slow party usually is.

"We are not the brake," he said. "We can be fast, because we are small. We don't have thousands of employees. It is more a procurement speed, an administration speed, than us. They are slow in decision making, because they have so many levels, and at every level there is someone who has to say yes and give a signature. Then there is one person who would like to have this like this and not that way, and then you start again."

There is a version of this story that is about a market opportunity, and the numbers are there for it. Europe's coast guards are stretched across border enforcement, migrant rescue, illegal fishing and, since the Nord Stream explosions of 2022 and the string of Baltic cable and pipeline incidents that followed, the protection of undersea infrastructure.

NATO stood up Baltic Sentry in January 2025 to deter that sabotage, and incidents have continued, with a cargo vessel seized off Finland on the last day of 2025 and another boarded days later after damage to a link to Lithuania. Cheap attack boats have rewritten the risk calculus for expensive warships. Uncrewed systems are arriving faster than doctrine.

But the story Steckstor keeps telling is the smaller one, about the gear.

A ship built at enormous expense to be the quietest thing in the water, doing everything correctly, in the right sea state, at the right speed, was defeated by a faulty component in a rack that nobody was watching, detected 600 meters away and 100 meters down. The lesson he took from it was not that quiet is hard. It was that quiet is decided by the part of the system no one is paying attention to.

He is now the part of the system no one is paying attention to. Whether a market organized around 15 year procurement cycles is capable of hearing something that small is a different acoustic problem, and it is the one his company will be measured against.