As navies like the UK Royal Navy transition to crewed/uncrewed ‘hybrid’ force structures, BMT’s new DISC simulation facility offers the capacity to test uncrewed system operation and integration.
BMT has unveiled its Digital Innovation and Simulation Centre (DISC): a new, mission-grade facility that can assist navies like the UK Royal Navy (RN) transition to future ‘hybrid’ force structures built around crewed/uncrewed platform integration.
DISC also supports another RN shift – towards wider use of synthetic training environments.
Regarding ‘hybrid navy’ transitions, a factor to consider is the speed at which navies need to both introduce autonomous systems and shift to ‘hybrid’ force structures and outputs. Helping navies understand these challenges is a key DISC offering, Monty Long, BMT’s regional future business director, told media at the facility’s opening on 13 March 2026, at the company’s site in Fareham, southern England. “Navies are moving at pace,” said Long. “Doing that [addressing these challenges] synthetically helps them do it even quicker than they would do today.”
In a statement, BMT – a UK-based but internationally focused design, engineering, science and risk management consultancy – said the facility provides a state-of-the-art virtual/mixed-reality test and training environment that can help de-risk next-generation naval platforms, including uncrewed systems, supporting acceleration of their use within ‘hybrid navy’ transition processes. This includes understanding how human interface and regulatory factors can help support uncrewed system safe operation and integration within a naval battlespace that is increasingly cluttered in operational terms and increasingly digital in technical terms.
DISC’s facilities include a reconfigurable full mission bridge for defence and commercial vessels; two 360° pod simulators; two small-vessel simulators; a remote operations centre (ROC); a scenario control room; an instructor/briefing room; and meeting/breakout spaces. In technical terms, the DNV-accredited DISC supports platform design reviews, system assurance, and platform and crew training events. In operational terms it generates complex, credible and scalable training scenarios.
During the media visit, one of the small-vessel simulators was rigged as the bridge of the RN autonomous capabilities experimentation vessel XV Patrick Blackett, illustrating DISC’s focus on RN/NATO requirements. The ROC facility accommodates software for remotely operated vehicles (ROVs), testing it against operational realities to be encountered on board the ROV, including port and harbour navigation. The full mission bridge can be set up as a large, crewed vessel and, being interconnected with the small-vessel sims, for example, provides the opportunity to test crewed/uncrewed teaming, including ‘mothership’ concepts. “That’s really exciting, especially with the ‘hybrid navy’ ambitions…. We can recreate uncrewed surface vessels and motherships and can ‘test and stress’,” Adam Northover, BMT’s business development manager for ports, infrastructure, and environment, told the briefing.
DISC harnesses BMT’s REMBRANDT high-fidelity hydrodynamic engine, Marine Autonomous Surface Ship (MASS) synthetic environment assurance system, and ENGAGE technologies. The latter allows generation of digital twin, virtual ship walk-through, and wargaming scenarios.
BMT believes its facility is unique in the UK. The concept is also designed for networking in a scalable manner into other facilities, including internationally.
Long highlighted DISC’s role as a facility international naval users can integrate with their existing bridge systems to test autonomous platforms in a live, dynamic manner, helping understand issues of integrating autonomy into fleets, including the crewed platform/autonomous systems mix.
These issues include understanding how to scale up autonomous platforms. “Many uncrewed systems are quite small currently, so how do you scale them up to something that operates at the right size?” Long asked. “A lot of regulatory issues are hidden by the scale of platforms …. We can use DISC to test, and get into, those regulatory regimes.”
Other issues relate to naval operational practicalities. Companies and navies need to know how their autonomous platforms will perform at sea, including in heavy sea states, and how to conduct maintenance at sea, including in such sea states. “Are you going to stress test that in the North Sea with an expensive cargo, or put it into a simulator like ours to start with?” Long asked. DISC’s various simulation and software tools can conduct such activities, he explained, including with sea states ramped up to stress hull form, stability and other elements.
In this context DISC helps navies accelerate understanding of how to operate this new type of capability in marine operational terms: knowledge that traditionally takes years to build.
“The ability to run through multiple scenarios within a synthetic environment is one of the keys,” said Noel Tomlinson, BMT’s commercial maritime senior business development manager. “We talk a lot in technology development about ‘failing fast’. There’s something in that about being able to use the synthetic environment to really test those areas of the application and then being able to adapt, modify, change and overcome those, and start to move through that design spiral far quicker.”
“In the synthetic world, you can ‘fast track’ what that design might see, which might otherwise take years – but to see it in ‘real world’ terms, you could do it in a synthetic world and accelerate the whole stress testing of it,” Dr Phil Thompson, the company’s commercial product development lead, added. “So, synthetic environments offering a high level of modelling granularity have got a crucial role to play in the developmental lifecycle of autonomy going forward.”
Regarding the next steps, navies should take in integrating uncrewed systems into force structures and operations, and how a tool like DISC could help, Jake Rigby – BMT’s head of innovation and research – told Warsight. “Navies should adopt a deliberate stepping‑stone approach to integrating uncrewed systems, starting with smaller platforms and a near-term operational focus, progressively working up to medium and large vessels with expanded role sets,” said Rigby. This approach allows focus on key challenges in delivering minimum viable capability, including addressing non-trivial scaling issues, but also questions like power and propulsion, which do not necessarily scale and raise new maintenance, logistics, and regulatory matters, he explained. “Using facilities like DISC, navies can stay one step ahead, by [placing] risk into the digital domain, where concepts, architectures and operational interactions can be explored, stressed and iterated at a fraction of the cost of physical trials,” Rigby said.
