Project 949A: Oscar-II

The general rule for the shipbuilding business is that a repair is always more expensive than building new

Very true...

We also don't know yet if the Zircon tubes will be inclined. They could vertical just like on Yasens and Gorshkovs.

The original Granit tubes are inclined so if the new tubes are fitted inside then they will be inclined too.

The launchers will most probably have to be slanted simply because the Tsirkons are said to be between one and two meters longer than the Granits. The Oniks as well as the tallest Kalibrs are nearly nine meters long as well.

Granit is 10 metres long which is longer than the UKSK launcher could fit because it is 10m deep so missiles that fit into it need to be shorter than that, so Zircon will be shorter than that.

If they load the liners and therefore the new missiles inside the existing Granit tubes then they will be angled too.

It may be that these containers for the missiles could be of open ended architecture so that longer tubes could be suspended?

That is definitely a possibility, though rather than "extending" the UKSK launcher itself, they have been working on what has been called UKSK-M and if that is the case then there are obviously some issues with the current UKSK launcher that they want to address... which might include tube width and tube length, as well as potentially being able to be loaded on an angle, and other features we might not be aware of.

What makes me uncertain here, is the fact that even if they have tested the angeled Oniks on some corvette, they don't run any serious upgrade program for the existing fleet.
Lots of MRKs would be suitable for refitting and could be useful for many years - in the opposite when retaining the P-120 they carry.
The answer to that is that they either expect massive deliveries of fresh new missile corvettes in required numbers, so no point in wasting time to modify 1241 that proved to be very reliable, but still coming into their 40s, or the angeled USKS/missile container is not such a great idea as we might think.

I suspect as good as previous missile craft might have been all the improvements in electronics and systems probably means a new ship will be rather better and shouldn't be too hard to mass produce in numbers by several yards once they have decided on the final specs and configuration.

Certainly minor upgrades could be made and gifted to allies where the boats are too good to scrap, but I suspect they might also want to export new small boats too...

New boats will accommodate new systems and equipment like UAVs and surface and subsurface drones that were never even considered on older vessels, and of course new radar and sonar arrays and new electronics will have moved on considerably in the last 40 years... not to mention the new boats will be mostly if not all Russian components which will replace a lot of imported stuff too... which is better for the Russian economy.

If you look at the UKSK design it is actually made up of two large tubes each of which carries four launch tubes for missiles... perhaps instead of going with the original Granit tubes loaded with three missiles in each of the 24 launch tubes, they instead replaced the tubes with UKSK tubes on an angle...

Here is the UKSK launch system with the two large tubes revealed:



And here is the Granit tube:



And another view showing single missile tubes in a single row of 12 missiles on each side of the sub....




So if each of the existing Granit tubes is removed and replaced with one UKSK tube with four missiles inside that would mean 24 tubes in total, 12 on each side, but each tube represents half of one UKSK launcher as the UKSK launcher has two tubes, so effectively they should be fitting the equivalent of 12 UKSK launchers which should be able to carry 12 x 8 = 96 missiles... which is clearly wrong... according to that report they only carry half that, so maybe angling them vertically means they can only fit the equivalent of 3 UKSK launchers on each side, which would have 3 x 8 = 24 missiles per side for a total of 48 missiles in the vertical launch tubes.

Obviously the Antei class can probably fit another 40 torpedoes or missiles to be fired through its torpedo tubes as well which could carry calibr missiles too but with Zircon it would not really need enormous numbers of missiles to remain effective... and very capable... considering the range and speed increase over the Granits.

Well that is an important factor too, because if they are taking out each Granit tube and replacing it with a Half UKSK launcher (one of the two tubes used in each launcher), then they might fit them vertically instead of on an angle...

This would have the enormous advantage of allowing a full range of missile types to be carried... it could carry Zircon, but equally it could also carry 5,000km range land attack nuclear armed cruise missiles... but also ballistic rocket based anti sub torpedo carrying missiles so in an enemy sub rich environment it could carry 48 sub killing rockets that would carry anti sub torpedoes to targets 50km away at mach 2.5 which would deliver torpedoes to the vicinity of enemy subs in a couple of minutes that they then will have to evade or defeat... launching jammers and other actions will reveal the presence of enemy subs... you might get lucky and detect one or another platform spots a shape in the water and transmits its location to you so you launch an attack and when your torpedo splashes down you might find several subs are there and all jamming and manouvering or diving down a layer to evade your weapon...

In comparison launching a long range torpedo will take quite a long time to get there... and all the time making noise on its way, giving the target rather more time to leave the area or set noise decoys.

Loading UKSK tubes makes sense because it means you are fully standardised and can be loaded from any Russian port or support ship that reloads UKSK launchers and the flexibility of being able to load different weapons is huge.

Even just loading Zircons means you have a missile of about 1/3rd the weight with more than two times the flight range and almost five times faster probably flying and twice the altitude... even if they carried the same number it would be a serious upgrade.

Next gen subs can be desiged to better integrate vertical launch systems... of course modern subs can already carry launch tubes of the horizontal type that can't be reloaded from the inside of the sub but carry things like decoys or self defence weapons that intercept incoming weapons that fire forwards and backwards... they could be located between the inner and outer hull of the sub so they don't take up any useful internal space and are always ready to be launched forward or backwards... they could even be designed to be mounted on the keel of the sub underneath pointing to either side of the sub if required... almost like a sub based Drozd APS system...

Agreed with that kind of capacity it could carry a full compliment of anti sea, land, and undersea weaponry and essentially act as an arsenal boat at need to do whatever is asked of it. Like a universal shock and awe weapon.