Upgraded Kirov class: Project 11442 [Admiral Nakhimov]

But during Soviet times they were connected to the local electrical grid, but after the fall of communism they had to pay their bills and clearly chose alternatives.

Honestly if I had a big enormous nuclear powered ship that I had no current or foreseeable use for I would use it to power itself and local buildings too... the alternative is to freeze...

If there was no future planned use for the ship then conserving the nuclear fuel makes little sense... saving it for what... when right now you could use it.

A ship that size is always going to be more expensive to run than a smaller ship whether the NPP was at zero hours or had 20 years or more on the clock...

The upgraded cruiser "Admiral Nakhimov" will enter the Navy in 2022:

The upgraded nuclear cruiser "Admiral Nakhimov" with hypersonic missiles "Zircon" and cruise missiles "Caliber" will enter the Russian Navy in 2022. This was announced on Wednesday, December 16, by Russian Deputy Minister Alexei Krivoruchko.

“We have checked the progress of the repair work. As planned, the ship is expected to be received at the end of 2022. These terms are not in doubt, ”he said while checking the fulfillment of the state defense order at the Sevmash enterprise.

On October 7, the Russian Ministry of Defense published a video of the launch of the Zircon hypersonic missile with an unparalleled control system and an ultra-precise homing head. The missile covered 450 km in 4.5 minutes, which, according to experts, leaves the enemy only a fraction of a second to defeat it.

The day before, from the White Sea, the lead frigate of Project 22350 "Admiral of the Fleet of the Soviet Union Gorshkov" fired "Zircon" at a sea target in the Barents Sea.

Russian President Vladimir Putin called the work on the Zircon system and the stage of the successful testing of this missile "a great event not only in the life of the armed forces, but in the whole of Russia."

The Admiral Nakhimov will be one of the first ships to receive the Zircon hypersonic missiles. These warheads are capable of exceeding the speed of sound nine times, while maneuvering and changing trajectory during flight.

https://yandex.ru/turbo/iz.ru/s/1100893/2020-12-16/modernizirovannyi-kreiser-admiral-nakhimov-voidet-v-sostav-vmf-v-2022-godu?promo=navbar&utm_referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fzen.yandex.com

The task of 2021 is to prepare the cruiser "Admiral Nakhimov" for testing

18.01.2021 09:40

On the cruiser "Admiral Nakhimov", which is being repaired and modernized at Sevmash, the installation of ship equipment and preparation for the supply of standard power supply is underway.

Sevmash specialists started assembling equipment and mechanisms last year. Now the cable is being tightened on the ship. The facility will be supplied with standard power supply, workers and specialists of Sevmash will have to close all construction documents. Then, according to the methods developed by the designer, the ship will undergo mooring tests at the berth.

Further, the cruiser is waiting for sea trials directly at sea. They will involve the military crew and the delivery teams of the enterprise. Now specialists are undergoing training and certification.

- Now it is absolutely clear what and how to do, - emphasizes Vladimir Pavlov, the responsible delivery officer of the Project 1144M ship. - Of course, there are many difficulties in the repair and testing of such an object, but they are surmountable. The main thing is that everyone - both the military and the builders - has an understanding that this cruiser with a huge striking power is very much needed by our country.

After being renovated and transferred to the Russian Navy, the Admiral Nakhimov will be the most powerful surface ship in the Russian Navy. Its dimensions make it possible to accommodate a wide range of electronic equipment, attack and defense equipment.

http://www.sevmash.ru/rus/news/3046-2021-01-18-05-41-32.html

I think the next one they do (or hopefully even this one) should have deckspace and power to test laser weapons. Those seem to be advancing at a high rate although I am still skeptical of their ability to deal with a massed attack of missiles. I think surface treatments and maybe base gasses emitted from the tip of the missile can counter the laser long enough to get through,.

mnztr wrote:I think the next one they do (or hopefully even this one) should have deckspace and power to test laser weapons. Those seem to be advancing at a high rate although I am still skeptical of their ability to deal with a massed attack of missiles. I think surface treatments and maybe base gasses emitted from the tip of the missile can counter the laser long enough to get through,.

They won't just use the lasers. Down as many as you can from far away with S-300 missiles. Then when they get closer use 9m96 then tor/9m100 then ak-630.

Use the lasers when you can to down some of them.

Isos wrote:

mnztr wrote:I think the next one they do (or hopefully even this one) should have deckspace and power to test laser weapons. Those seem to be advancing at a high rate although I am still skeptical of their ability to deal with a massed attack of missiles. I think surface treatments and maybe base gasses emitted from the tip of the missile can counter the laser long enough to get through,.

They won't just use the lasers. Down as many as you can from far away with S-300 missiles. Then when they get closer use 9m96 then tor/9m100 then ak-630.

Use the lasers when you can to down some of them.

I am sure NATO will have hypersonics at some point as well, and I doubt S300 can deal with those, although they may be able to develop a thermobaric warhead to create a shockwave powerful enough...

By the time HATO gets hypersonic anti ship missiles Russia will have naval S-500 and naval S-400 and enough practise to defeat them.

BTW the altitude a hypersonic missile would fly at would make blast wave weapons pointless... except if they are nuclear.

There are all sorts of directed energy beam weapons they could develop to intercept incoming threats, and also remember a hypersonic missile will be hot anyway, but they wont be able to withstand just any temperature.... and just flying normally will get them rather hot... a few seconds with a laser concentrating energy on it nose could do sufficient damage that the enormous speed of the platform means it destroys itself.

Look at the space shuttle with the damaged heat tile... heat was allowed to get inside the platform and compromise the entire structure and destroy the entire platform...

But of course concentrating that sort of energy at great distances is not easy... but then there was a time when heavier than air powered flight was impossible, but the internal combustion engine and stronger lighter materials and aerodynamics and a few other technology breakthroughs have made it perfectly normal.

Its unclear if lasers can penetrate the cloud of plasma that will surround a hypersonic object. It would be interesting to know if that is permeable by light.

GarryB wrote:By the time HATO gets hypersonic anti ship missiles Russia will have naval S-500 and naval S-400 and enough practise to defeat them.

BTW the altitude a hypersonic missile would fly at would make blast wave weapons pointless... except if they are nuclear.

There are all sorts of directed energy beam weapons they could develop to intercept incoming threats, and also remember a hypersonic missile will be hot anyway, but they wont be able to withstand just any temperature.... and just flying normally will get them rather hot... a few seconds with a laser concentrating energy on it nose could do sufficient damage that the enormous speed of the platform means it destroys itself.

Look at the space shuttle with the damaged heat tile... heat was allowed to get inside the platform and compromise the entire structure and destroy the entire platform...

But of course concentrating that sort of energy at great distances is not easy... but then there was a time when heavier than air powered flight was impossible, but the internal combustion engine and stronger lighter materials and aerodynamics and a few other technology breakthroughs have made it perfectly normal.

I really don't think missiles are a viable way to intercept hypersonic weapons.

Laser tehnology is far from beeing good enough to intercept hypersonic misslies. It is one thing to melt the aluminium skin of a subsonic or even supersonic mislile, it is qute another to melt the materials of a hypersonic missile that are built from heat resistant materials. And that is before you consider the time you have to melt this material is far shorter, and the level of accurasy must be much higher.

tomazy wrote:Laser tehnology is far from beeing good enough to intercept hypersonic misslies. It is one thing to melt the aluminium skin of a subsonic or even supersonic mislile, it is qute another to melt the materials of a hypersonic missile that are built from heat resistant materials. And that is before you consider the time you have to melt this material is far shorter, and the level of accurasy must be much higher.

Yes I get that, I am not even sure if lasers can penetrate the plasma cloud around hypersonics. Furthermore the missile can be designed with a layer that erodes and gives of opaque gasses. It does not have to last long, just a few minutes. But short of nuclear warheads I don't see how SAMs can be effective.

tomazy wrote:Laser tehnology is far from beeing good enough to intercept hypersonic misslies. It is one thing to melt the aluminium skin of a subsonic or even supersonic mislile, it is qute another to melt the materials of a hypersonic missile that are built from heat resistant materials. And that is before you consider the time you have to melt this material is far shorter, and the level of accurasy must be much higher.

Well aren't the heat resistant materials already at their limit when a hypersonic missile is flying, and it just takes a few more degrees to detroy them?

limb wrote:
Well aren't the heat resistant materials already at their limit when a hypersonic missile is flying, and it just takes a few more degrees to detroy them?

They can probably build some margin in them or build some strakes so that it will take a long time to burn through, then they can also put a temp sensor that will release liquid nitrogen spray to keep it cool, it only needs to last a very short time. Also remember, missiles can ride that laser beam as a homing signal....

Regardless of the performance of any potential laser-based defense system, the difficulty will always be in tracking an incoming hypersonic weapon with sufficient accuracy to allow a defensive beam to be focused upon the target for long enough to burn through the missiles ablative coatings. Tracking (and pointing) errors combine to increase the time needed to gain a kill, and their size and complexity will mean that laser turrets will be few in number and therefore greatly reduce the number of simultaneous engagements. I suspect that it will simply prove impossible to build a laser targetting system that can (a) handle the power required (megawatts at least), (b) be positioned accurately enough and with a sufficiently fast response time to put energy on target to get a kill in an acceptably short timeframe, and (c) be robust and reliable enough that it can achieve 99%+ availability without needing constant calibration & testing by specialised personnel.

IMHO all these factors add up to put the ball firmly in the court of the hypersonic PGM. The defender is always going to be behind the curve as between near-peer adversaries, its easier to attack a target with missile/artillery than to defend it. Hypersonics are even more so. Supercarriers are facing the end of their era in peer-to-peer 1st Power conflicts. Their usefulness will be increasingly confined to smacking small nations that lack hypersonics or powerful allies willing to stand with them.

Its unclear if lasers can penetrate the cloud of plasma that will surround a hypersonic object. It would be interesting to know if that is permeable by light.

200 year ago it would be absurd to suggest you could fly around the world, or shoot down a bullet with another bullet.

A laser would not need to penetrate a cloud of plasma forming at the nose of a hypersonic object... the laser energy would heat the plasma cloud to much higher temperatures and could actually make it easier for the the laser to defeat the missile...

I really don't think missiles are a viable way to intercept hypersonic weapons.

Well they will have a decade to try with their own high speed missiles and interceptors to work it out... they might have to resort to nuclear warheads to start with but as they work on them I am sure they could develop interceptors that will be effective.

The problem is serious, but hitting a target moving at 7km/s is not trivial yet the S-500 is intended for that job.

Laser tehnology is far from beeing good enough to intercept hypersonic misslies. It is one thing to melt the aluminium skin of a subsonic or even supersonic mislile, it is qute another to melt the materials of a hypersonic missile that are built from heat resistant materials. And that is before you consider the time you have to melt this material is far shorter, and the level of accurasy must be much higher.

Agreed, but the laser weapon in this case will likely be on a cruiser so size wont be an issue and enormous amounts of power should be available.

A hypersonic missile will be made to resist high temperatures because of the speed it operates at, but a hypersonic missile will already likely be operating at near the boundaries that normal modern materials can take, which means a few seconds of laser illumination might be enough to take the materials beyond what they can sustain and cause a localised failure... these things certainly are moving fast but they will generally be moving towards the laser located nearest the target so while moving very fast they will be getting closer and closer to the laser making lasing the target easier and over time improving the chances of a success.

Yes I get that, I am not even sure if lasers can penetrate the plasma cloud around hypersonics. Furthermore the missile can be designed with a layer that erodes and gives of opaque gasses. It does not have to last long, just a few minutes. But short of nuclear warheads I don't see how SAMs can be effective.

The solution might not be to shoot the hypersonic missile down... the solution might be to jam its guidance so it hits open water, or use some sort of EMP weapon to fry its internal electronics so it stops manouvering and continues straight till it runs out of fuel and plunges into the water.

Well aren't the heat resistant materials already at their limit when a hypersonic missile is flying, and it just takes a few more degrees to detroy them?

A laser adding a few hundred degrees might make a part of the missile fail, which lets heat inside and could perhaps set off an explosive warhead or fry the electronics, or fundamentally damage the structure of the weapon causing it to explode and disintegrate in flight...

They can probably build some margin in them or build some strakes so that it will take a long time to burn through, then they can also put a temp sensor that will release liquid nitrogen spray to keep it cool, it only needs to last a very short time. Also remember, missiles can ride that laser beam as a homing signal....

So put the laser on a tug boat... liquid nitrogen freezing the outer shell of the missile in flight could create a freeze thaw situation that shatters the entire aircraft better than any missile strike.

Regardless of the performance of any potential laser-based defense system, the difficulty will always be in tracking an incoming hypersonic weapon with sufficient accuracy to allow a defensive beam to be focused upon the target for long enough to burn through the missiles ablative coatings.

Even a focussed laser beam from 100km is going to be 10 metres across... maybe focussed down to 1 metre... keeping that on target is made easy by its speed.

A hypersonic target is not going to be jinking like a helicopter or small drone... the g forces means direction changes can be made but not radical ones... it is the forward speed that makes a 5 degree angle of flight change effective because after travelling for 5 seconds that means a physical flight path deviation of thousands of metres... which no interceptor can match in 5 seconds... but if the laser is located where the missile is headed then it is a closing target end on that will move sideways and up and down but wont be like a side on view where it is moving 3km a second or more and be much harder to keep in your crosshairs.

Supercarriers are facing the end of their era in peer-to-peer 1st Power conflicts.

They were always highly questionable in such a conflict... they are just too important for an enemy to ignore or put up with... they are like AWACS aircraft in WWIII... you can't ignore them... taking them down will have an enormous effect on HATO, because their entire battle plan is built around using them to coordinate the attack... and their air attack and air defence is built around these platforms, compared with Russia where the AWACS aircraft are used to fill a couple of gaps in ground radar coverage... which these days with all their OTH radar probably don't exist any more, but they are still useful for actually commanding aircraft in combat.

Lots of counter measures for the missile, I don't think heating the plasma will work because it is a transient layer and moving so quickly, the missile could also have its own cooling system that uses a small amount of liquid nitrogen to cool off the missile in terminal stage. The window too shoot it down will be pretty small, which will require a very powerful laser. If they can really ramp to laser power to 3-5 mw then they may have something.

Big_Gazza wrote:Regardless of the performance of any potential laser-based defense system, the difficulty will always be in tracking an incoming hypersonic weapon with sufficient accuracy to allow a defensive beam to be focused upon the target for long enough to burn through the missiles ablative coatings. Tracking (and pointing) errors combine to increase the time needed to gain a kill, and their size and complexity will mean that laser turrets will be few in number and therefore greatly reduce the number of simultaneous engagements.  I suspect that it will simply prove impossible to build a laser targetting system that can (a) handle the power required (megawatts at least), (b) be positioned accurately enough and with a sufficiently fast response time to put energy on target to get a kill in an acceptably short timeframe, and (c) be robust and reliable enough that it can achieve 99%+ availability without needing constant calibration & testing by specialised personnel.

IMHO all these factors add up to put the ball firmly in the court of the hypersonic PGM.  The defender is always going to be behind the curve as between near-peer adversaries, its easier to attack a target with missile/artillery than to defend it. Hypersonics are even more so.  Supercarriers are facing the end of their era in peer-to-peer 1st Power conflicts.  Their usefulness will be increasingly confined to smacking small nations that lack hypersonics or powerful allies willing to stand with them.

It will be very interesting when a benfactor nation gives a weaker nation a few silver bullets to defend itself. Like for example if the US attacks a country with carriers and Russia gives them a couple of Tsirkons just to test.

mnztr wrote:It will be very interesting when a benfactor nation gives a weaker nation a few silver bullets to defend itself. Like for example if the US attacks a country with carriers and Russia gives them a couple of Tsirkons just to test.

More likely a Russian destroyer (or cruiser) equipped with Zircons visits the hotspot to fly the flag while Moscow openly states its support for the target of US buttfuckery. US ardour for bloodshed will cool dramatically if a Russian warship inserts itself in between their warfleet and its intended victim nation.

Big_Gazza wrote:

More likely a Russian destroyer (or cruiser) equipped with Zircons visits the hotspot to fly the flag while Moscow openly states its support for the target of US buttfuckery. US ardour for bloodshed will cool dramatically if a Russian warship inserts itself in between their warfleet and its intended victim nation.

Russia can do that now, but the US knows that Russia is not likely to attack a US asset directly. The stakes are too high. It will be done through proxies.

mnztr wrote:

Big_Gazza wrote:

More likely a Russian destroyer (or cruiser) equipped with Zircons visits the hotspot to fly the flag while Moscow openly states its support for the target of US buttfuckery. US ardour for bloodshed will cool dramatically if a Russian warship inserts itself in between their warfleet and its intended victim nation.

Russia can do that now, but the US knows that Russia is not likely to attack a US asset directly. The stakes are too high. It will be done through proxies.

We're not talking about Russia attacking a US asset. Thats simply not their style. Their intention is to restrain the US from unilateral agressions against Russias friends and allies, or against anyone else for that mattter.

Russia benefits from a world with rules that are followed by all. The US gains by imposing rules on everyone else, but then making exceptions for itself.

@mnztr
All this talk of putting a laser on a ship... I think they are probably at a stage where putting actual weapons on ships is starting to make sense because technology will have developed to the point where it might become a useful tool rather than a token show weapon that is ineffectual.

Russia and the Soviets have a history of combining solutions rather than replacing them... a new laser system in the west would become the main defence and all other defence systems removed to make more room for it.

The Russians will keep their small and medium and large calibre guns... 30mm, 57mm, 76mm and 100mm an 130mm and probably add 152mm calibre guns (the 45mm guns are usually for ceremonial purposes so I wont count them), as well as HMGs that are also widely deployed on all Russian ships, they will also keep their SAMS and will expand their deployment too and dedicated CIWS will also be carried in much larger numbers than any western ships because the Russians clearly recognise the danger of anti ship weapons more acutely than the western ship builders.

A first gen Russian laser defence weapon... well they already have some... they have been mentioned before and were deployed to Syria and were intended to interfere in the guidance of ATGMs like TOW et all by dazzling the optics of the guidance system.

A major new laser system for their large ships will only have an effective range of maybe 5km or so, which sounds pathetic because that can't engage hypersonic missiles... so lets write it off and call it useless... but what if that 5km range laser system can bring down drones and can do it cheaper than a missile in terms of electrical power from a nuclear reactor the cost would be negligible.... and of course using a laser to destroy drones or low flying missiles means not needing to fire a gun or a missile which can be saved for other things.

At much greater range it might defeat optical and IR and IIR guided weapons simply by blinding them... hell they might even be super clever and work out some way of firing off a large calibre smoke shell to land in the water 2km away from the ship and then the laser can be used to draw the pattern of a ship in the smoke.... heating it up to form an IR image of a vessel that might fool a missile...

The potential is enormous and over time with experience and use they can improve it and make it more powerful and faster firing and with a much greater range, so the fourth or fifth model they make might kill targets at 20km and be a super cheap compact system that they make a land version of to deal with damn small drones that missiles are way to expensive for...

It will form another layer of defence that has its own features and advantages and disadvantages... just like an Aircraft Carrier adds layers of vision and detection with an AWACS platform, and also an ability to go out and inspect or attack or defend with fighter aircraft.

Each layer makes the ships safer and more capable and more flexible.

The USA is deploying HELIOS on an aegis destroyer very shortly. I think its now at 60 KW and will ramp up. I a skeptical a laser can ever be an "all weather" weapon. We all know light can be diffused and refracted by weather and thermals. How can it possily not be affected by fog. Yet we all know that something like Tsirkon can be targeted a multitude of ways. So maybe they attack in the rain, when there is low level cloud, who knows. Lasers will be useful but I agree they cannot be a singular do it all weapon.

60kW beam power to bring down a hypersonic weapon? Yeah sure....

This weapon will be useful against drones and maybe subsonic AShMs (on a good day) but useless against hypersonics. This is just another example of the USN having an unceasing hard-on for new technology and its brass never seeing a weapon system they didn't want bolted onto one their hulls (plus a private MIC only too willing to take gubbermint cash in return for useless products that don't work properly except to boost the yearly profit for the manufacturer)

The USA is deploying HELIOS on an aegis destroyer very shortly. I think its now at 60 KW and will ramp up. I a skeptical a laser can ever be an "all weather" weapon. We all know light can be diffused and refracted by weather and thermals.

Are you thinking about visible light when you talk about the effects weather has on light?

How can it possily not be affected by fog.

Rough seas would also effect its ability to remain on a distant target... real world issues are a bitch.

Yet we all know that something like Tsirkon can be targeted a multitude of ways. So maybe they attack in the rain, when there is low level cloud, who knows. Lasers will be useful but I agree they cannot be a singular do it all weapon.

A gamma ray laser or whatever that might be called might fuse all the electronic components inside an incoming weapon and render it useless, there are as many different frequencies a directed energy weapon could use as there are situations where they might want to use them... and at the end of the day a radar jammer on a buoy in the middle of the water and a huge smoke screen covering your ships position might be all it takes to protect from most US anti ship missiles...

As I said the first few laser systems will be rather limited, but by no means useless. Over time the technology will get better... as will the performance and distance and type of targets and jobs it can perform.

The first ABM system the US planned to build in Europe was rubbish, but their plans for the third upgrade including defending against ICBMs using multiple cluster interceptors that could be launched as single weapons and then release multiple interceptors to shoot down several targets at a time.... that is what the Russians were objecting to...