Triple-hulled Triton misses the boat

AS Britain's largest defence exhibition for two years gets under way in the Docklands on Tuesday, one of the nation's biggest innovative stars will be missing, overtaken by foreign competition.

The research vessel Triton, an experimental 90-metre trimaran warship built with £13m of taxpayers' money in 2000, has won only a minor role, supporting a design by Australian shipbuilder Austal for a potential multi-billion contract for the US Navy.

The idea of students at University College London, the warship has been touted as a replacement for the Royal Navy's Type 22 and Type 23 frigates but there is still no hint of a Ministry of Defence contract.

The three-hulled ship was the first of its kind to be tested at sea - in co-operation with the US Navy and US Coastguard - but the Americans have preferred the aluminium designs of Austal to the steel-hulled Triton of QinetiQ, a privatised successor to the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency (Dera).

The US Navy wants to build up to 60 fast, relatively small littoral combat ships (LCS) to deal with explosive-laden speedboats, gunrunners and mines, and QinetiQ had hoped to win major design contracts. But industry sources say it has failed to tie up agreements with US shipyards, and so is only a small part of a £5.5m preliminary design contract.

'It's rather sad,' said Triton project manager Bob Short. 'We've done most of the research on this design but what we really seem to have done is alerted them [US naval designers] to its potential.'

Paul Beaver, a spokesman for the Defence Systems and Equipment International (DSEi) exhibition, which opens at the Excel Centre in the Docklands on Tuesday, said: 'British industry has a record for innovation and invention that often does not bring home the bacon in terms of production orders.

'The problem in the past has been convincing customers that Britain can deliver, and industry itself is a problem in that it does not do enough lateral thinking.

'One of the aspects of DSEi that is becoming more and more critical is industry-to-industry relationships that lead to partnering across national borders and which also bring in government as stakeholders.'