Russian nuclear submarine catches fire (no danger to others)

[Purple]

Is is that first picture a Kirov then? That picture has the missiles arranged in a circle, that doesn't appear to be the case in the second.

Because there is no way you can hide a round object under a square hatch.

[TimothyC]

Is is that first picture a Kirov then? That picture has the missiles arranged in a circle, that doesn't appear to be the case in the second.

If it isn't a Kirov, it's a Slava which shares the same SAM system (the Kirov however has 50% more launchers). I can say it's one of the two because those are the SA-N-6 launchers. They are launched from eight-round rotary magazines that have a single hatch for each revolver-like launcher. That is how you get a square hatch, but a circular configuration.

[Beowulf]

The image appears to be taken straight from wikipedia, which attributes to it being a shot of the foredeck of Kirov, and being sourced by the USN.

[Sea Skimmer]

Holy shit, is that for real. Why the hell are the Russians wasting all that space!

Because the ships are limited by topweight, not total weight. They need that space in the hull to provide buoyancy/stability for the massive superstructure and deck mounted armament. This is true of most missile-radar era warships, while gun-armor era warships tended to be limited by overall weight.

It makes sense in context. The Kirov in particular is not like a traditional western missile cruiser. The Soviet Union newer really developed a proper aircraft carrier fleet so they relied on their ship designs to work around that. The Kirov in particular is a huge atomic AA ship. Its purpose is to strike a carrier air wing from the sky and than sink the carrier with missiles whose range equals those aircraft.

Its a command ship actually, intended to lead ASW task groups. The mere weapons could have fit on a considerably smaller hull. Kirov is the result of a project for an ASW destroyer merging with a project for an anti surface warfare cruiser (1165 Fugas) and a fresh requirement for large command ships, after 1970s exercises showed previous Soviet doctrine of shore based command would not work. In NATO fleets aircraft carriers filled a comparable command role. Anyway Soviet electronics being huge and power hungry, on top of all the other huge and power hungry systems piled on the ship drove up size considerably, and are a factor in why the ships nuclear power cannot produce full speed and it needs oil burning boilers for boost power. The Soviets didn't go bankrupt for being very logical about stuff like this.

No, I mean huge AA ship. Take a look at its weapon load.
20 x P-700 Long range anti ship missile
14 x SS-N-14 Anti sub missile
96 x S-300F Long range AA missile
128 x 9K95 Point Defense AA missile
40 x SA-N-4 Short range AA missile

So that's a total of 20 anti ship launchers, 14 anti sub launchers and 264 AA launchers. The thing is meant to shoot down carrier air wings. The anti ship and anti sub loadout are an afterthought that exists simply because the Soviets added those to every ship they had, carriers included.

Your mixing systems that never appeared on the same hull, SS-N-14 was only on the first unit which only had AK-630 and not the hybrid gun-missile mounts found on the last pair. All the other actually fire SS-N-15 ASW missiles out of the torpedo tubes, 20 total slots for torpedo tube weapons, and apparently it was doctrine for the ships to only carry such missiles and no torpedoes at all. The RBUs were seen as good enough for close range work where the ASW missile would have problems with minimal firing range.

But yeah, command ship with a billion weapons. Trying to 'pin down' the role beyond that is futile, they didn't have one. Nor did they have a healthy design process. It was very political process because so many big design bureaus where trying to get there new systems onto the ship to gain importance for themselves. But many of those systems were also delayed or slow to mature, thus the repeated armament and system changes.

It's because the ship was designed to be rearmed at sea. Its missiles are too big to load them down the hatches like small Western missiles in VLS, so they are loaded down central hatch and distributed to launchers by rail system.

Umm no? Mechanized power rail launchers in the west loaded down a dedicated strike down hatch, horizontally normally, which was fairly easy to do, but both sides VLS reload the same way, by crane vertically from the top in to each silo in turn. Reloading at sea is impossible for these systems. There is no central hatch I can see in any S-300 ship, nor for that matter space for one to fit. Soviet mechanized launchers appear to have reloaded both via strike down hatches and in some case by cycling missiles down the launcher rail.

The reason for the suspended canisters for S-300 is its great for shock hardening to hang them like that (ICBMs work the same way), and its also a legacy of the original plan under which the PVO, Army and Naval versions of S-300 were supposed to use the same missile and radars. The radar compatibility had to be dropped early, it was technologically impossible to do what was demanded, but the missiles shared a lot more commonality. Thus same sort of soft launch canister used for the land based systems is used at sea.

This canister approach has the advantage of avoiding the large exhaust duct required for Mk41, but cold launch vs hot launch have differing advantages depending on random details. For the USN cold launch wasn't an option out of hand because the system had to work with existing SM-2 series missiles that hot launched. Hot launch also has shorter reaction times and is safer in some but certainly not all aspects. Such as if a missile motor ignites in the tube, but the missile is stuck due to hangfire or the ignition being caused by accident or enemy action, you have a deflector + water to cope with it and Mk41 is rated to survive this occurring. On the other hand cold launch means any misfiring missiles that get as far as firing the steam generator are thrown overboard, provided you angle the ejection design slightly.

Ships with mechanized loading launchers were a lot more vulnerable to missile ignition, but some of them were also designed so the warheads could be removed from the missiles in storage, and in the case of Talos and Sea Slug you could defuel the missiles too. Mechanized launchers also generally kept the missiles lower in the ship, much lower in some instances, which reduced the chances of being hit by enemy fire.

The Soviet destroyer Otvazhny blew up and sank in 1974 after a peacetime accident in its aft SAM magazine which held liquid fuel weapons.



24 men killed, a pretty low tally for such heavy damage but the ship was ordered abandon before the fires spread to the torpedo magazine near the stern. Apparently she was more then lost and flooding in all her machinery spaces by the time the order was given anyway.

This also has advantage of not needing full combat load waiting to be hit or suffer accident all the time, making the system safer.

Actually its horrendously more vulnerable. Missiles in vertical launch systems cannot be defueled, and they cannot be disarmed. The missiles are live and vulnerable at all times. Carrier planes are defueled and disarmed if they aren't being prepared for a strike which is most of the time. The Russian liquid fueled SSMs in particularly were horrendous vulnerabilities. Nor does the moderate armoring on Kirov compare at all with the armor against 2000lb class bombs that protects the magazines on a Nimitz.

Of course, this wastes space, but it's not a destroyer - think of it as heavy combatant like carrier, so this hall is equivalent of its 'hangar deck' from which the strikes are launched. You might as well point at all the planes, bombs and fuel stored under the deck on USS Nimitz - and carrier is actually less protected than Kirovs.

Bullshit.A Nimitz has armor against 1000lb and 2000lb class bombs as well as a TDS tested against 2000lb torpedo warheads, while nothing on a Kirov was meant to stop more then a 500lb bomb or missile warhead and the ship has no TDS whatso ever. Kirov had a 35mm thick armor deck on sploches, the Nimitz has three inches on the flight and gallery deck over the entire hanger and astern of it, and even more in layers below the hanger deck to protect the reactors and magazines. How thick is classified, but the design standard was 1000lb bombs on the machinery and 2000lb on the magazines.

Nor is the armor all that extensive on Kirov for what it is, it box protection on the P-700 magazine, the CIC and the reactor. Everything else is open season as ever. US super carriers are proven to survive accidents involving enough ordnance to obliterate a ship the size of Kirov. How many 1000lb bombs do you think could detonate on the deck of Kirov before she was destroyed. Forrestal still had full power after nine of her own bombs exploded onboard.

Total mass of armor on Kirov was only about 900 ton or about 4% of her total displacement to round a bit. Even a lightly armored cruiser in WW2 was generally several times that, and battleships were in the 30-40% range.

Purple circles are quadruple 30 mm anti-missile chainguns. Red circles are short range anti-missile launchers. Blue rectangle is medium-range anti-missile and anti-aircraft system. Moreover, she also has heavy decoy launchers and as centre of a battlegroup is protected by outer anti-air layer of escorts. So, a missile would need to break through 5-6 different layers of defence to reach the ship, to hit exactly where the defensive arm concentration is the heaviest.

How many layers apply depends on the flight profile of the incoming threat and its axis. But you know, nothing compares to carrier launched radar planes and fighters for providing more or less infinite layers of defense and utterly incomparable situation awareness. The later being a lot more important then putting a few SSMs on a 25,000 ton cruiser.

The whole reason the later Kirov's have such massively heavy CIWS batteries in the first place, useless for defending anything but her own hull, is the Soviets had no faith in longer range SAMs against mass US carrier raids, because the engagement time is so limited vs low level threatsand they didn't have an AEGIS like system to make up for that. The carrier raids would be backed up by heavy equipped jamming planes too which could also serve as chaff bombers, and by the 1980s the USN had air launch decoys too to make life even mroe interesting.

The real solution to this is your own fighters, which can mass and disperse in real time in a manner SAM firing ships simply cannot, but until the late 1980s this was simply not an allowed option for the USSR. Really AEGIS itself wasn't a wonder weapon so much as a 'minimal' system needed for the modern age, but the Soviet just had nothing to compare with it, and actually the modern Russian fleet still hasn't gotten a ship with that sort of capability. China now has several in the water though. Anyway this drove the Soviets to brute force the situation via the Kashtan family, but this is real questionable in terms of overall fleet design. Works great for one ship, but all that mass of short range weapon adds up disfavorably because they can only protect the one ship and not a fleet.

Let's suppose it's possible. The catch, though, is that green rectangle houses P-700 Granit missiles. These have about 500–625 km range. Exocet? 70–180 km. So, yeah, good luck with that in wartime conditions.

Yeah good luck ever finding a target for P-700. Russia never solved that problem in any way which satisfied Red fleet commanders. The helicopter on a Kirov cannot locate a target 600km away. You need planes to do that, which have to come from somewhere else, at which point you might as well arm the planes and not the surface combatants. Thus the reason why nobody else on the planet has ever built anything like the Slava or Kirov classes. They make no bloody sense and only existed because of Soviet political restrictions on building CVs.

Slava though does show a nice contrast to Kirov, she has a lot more then half the firepower but on less then half the tonnage. That's largely because of the Kirov having such a large role as a command ship.

Meanwhile the piece of crap little French carrier launched Super Etendard has a unrefueled combat radius with an Exocet missile of about 850km. You add the actual missile range on top of that. P-700 is so huge and slow down low its not much less vulnerable then a manned aircraft either, and yet lacking in the means of self defense open to carrier planes, never mind escorted raids. The Tu-22M was a much greater threat then a Kirov ever could be.

US CVs could meanwhile could launch a plane called the A-6 in the cold war. This plane had a combat radius of 1,400km with four Harpoon missiles and one drop tank! That's double the striking range of the P-700 missile without even considering the actual range of the Harpoon, which while not vast would more then suffice to keep the jets safe against S-300F. The F/A-18 swarm has shorter unrefueled striking ranges, but even the smaller C/D model on a Hi-Lo-Lo-Hi mission has a radius to the tune of 550km with two Harpoons. And hi-hi-hi-hi goes much further, and its not like inflight refueling is unreasonable or unrealistic. This is the whole flexibility of having actual aircraft in play.

Shear range is becoming kinda irrelevant in the 21st century though because better turbine engines are allowing the west to build stupidly long range weapons without even trying hard. The Norwegian Joint Strike Missile for example is aiming for a 500km range, and a weight of less then 1000lb while still carrying a Harpoon sized 500lb class warhead. LRASM will go god knows how far, Block IV Tomahawk has been tested for anti ship work now with passive radar homing and optical terminal guidance and has 1000nm class range. But the OTH targeting problem remains for employing any of these systems.

[Sea Skimmer]

http://imageshack.com/a/img540/4678/nXDiFX.jpg

Radar coverage planning diagram from US Army field manual FM 44-1

This really helps illustrate the basic problem with any attempt to fight at sea without carrier based aircraft, or very closely based land support. The 4/3rd curve is used for air defense planning purposes because its reasonably close to average actual radar propagation ranges of 30cm-3cm band radars used for most military air defense purpose. Your blind arc becomes enormous as ranges increases. At a range of 300nm a shipboard radar probably wont be able to see a plane even at 50,000ft!

[Sea Skimmer]

This is the ultimate Soviet non command cruiser anything has turned up on. 1165 Fugas. Multiple versions designed and then folded into Kirov project. Double ended S-300 directors, but each only covers a 60 degree sector at a time. The Slava class was much smaller, and used different SSMs for production reasons, but one can see the clear relation in thinking to this ship.

[Elheru Aran]

^ Talk about your Macross Missile Massacres if that thing ever let go all at once...