Russian Navy: Status and News #6

Moskva would have been better in the northern fleet or the mediteranean keeping an eye on US carriers.

Moskva would have been fine anywhere at all if it had been given decent regular upgrades of systems and equipment.

If it was not good enough for the Black Sea then it would not be good enough anywhere except the Caspian or Sea of Azov floatillas.

Without upgrades it wasn't the capital ship it used to be.

Hopefully lesson learned... in saving some money it cost them the ship... something the British didn't learn from the Falklands where buying cheaper lighter carriers meant they lost ships that they shouldn't have lost... costing them rather more in lives and ships.

I suppose there is a question if they could make a cheaper version of the Admiral Gorshkov to mass produce or not.

I don't think it is cost that is effecting production... upgrading their shipyards and getting ships and subs into full serial production instead of oneoff types will boost production and improve efficiency and reduce costs.

But back then they had hundreds of ships and subs of all size.

Once this conflict is over they will want to send Black Sea fleet ships to north africa and further afield... I suspect their focus will shift from Europe to the rest of the world.

The shaftless power plant with a complete electric motion decreases the noise. Two propellants increase maneuverability and reliability.

So it uses propellers driven directly by electric motors like the Azipods on some surface ships... interesting.

So it uses propellers driven directly by electric motors like the Azipods on some surface ships... interesting. wrote:

The French already have it at Le Triomphant and the USA will have it at Columbia in a few years.

GarryB wrote:
So it uses propellers driven directly by electric motors like the Azipods on some surface ships... interesting.

Nothing new for Russkie subs.
Already in the 50s with new 671 nuclear subs, a reserve propulsion was designed. It was all-electric, powered by PG137 electric motors of 275 or 375 HP (RT and RTM) each. Both powered shafts passing through horizontal stabilizers, with two blade screws each. What is extremely interesting and represents the Soviet submarine building school, the whole system was fully automated and required zero access and maintenance.
This solution was chosen in favor of vanes or jet propellers as easier to both construct and operate at the time.

It is important to remember in a marine environment there are so many things in the ocean like old fishing nets and lines and of course seaweed and actual life in the ocean that can all become tangled in pumps and propellers that whichever design you choose has to be robust and reliable as well as quiet and efficient.

The location of the water intake relative to where the water must be ejected suggests it is probably reversable to generate forward or backward thrust, which would have the advantage that if one or both intakes get blocked going to full reverse might eject the blockage as long as you haven't moved too deeply into whatever is clogging your tubes so to speak.

Evtukhov also noted that import substitution in the construction of ships for the Russian Navy has reached 100%: “Today, no sanctions can affect construction and delivery.”

Which means all propulsion systems problems have been solved...

I don't agree that they are struggling to build large ships, what they are doing is designing and building solid reliable and working smaller ships and support ships before they move to making bigger ships that will operate with the smaller ships to get their job done.

There is no point making CVNs and Cruisers if there are not enough frigates and corvettes to defend home waters with.

They are currently building two 40K ton helicopter landing ships and an upgraded cruiser and their fixed wing aircraft carrier are about to get back into the water after upgrades and overhauls. Before serial producing new cruisers they will need to evaluate the new systems put on their upgraded cruiser to see if it is value for money or if something even better needs to be developed for the new cruisers they will be making eventually.

The main differences between an old corvette and a new corvette is that an old corvette was a specialised boat... it had torpedo tubes or anti ship missiles or anti sub weapons. It had a small gun like a 57mm or 76mm calibre weapon and some 30mm self defence gatlings, while the new corvettes have missile launch tubes that can load a variety of missiles previously only destroyers and larger ships could carry and they have 100mm guns that destroyers and some cruisers were armed with. The new corvettes have helicopters and a range of land attack and anti ship and anti sub missile options.

The difference between a modern corvette and a modern cruiser will largely be the size and types of sensors and self defence systems, and the calibre and number of guns and missile launch tubes. A new cruiser will have enormous radar arrays and enormous sonar arrays and all sorts of communication and battle management systems and an enormous number of launch tubes. It will also have lots of self defence guns from 30mm to 57mm right up to 152mm, but will also likely have lasers and an enormous number of missiles of all types. They will likely also carry their own drones and jammers to defend from drones and weapons. They will have S-500 SAMs to shoot down all sorts of ballistic threats and engage targets in space, in the air, on the water, under the water and on land.

It is going to take planning and work to come up with optimised designs... I rather suspect they will be nuclear powered and all electric drive systems and some rather exotic weapons will be tested on them too.

If they got China to build 30 destroyers and 14 cruisers for them over the next 10 years they will have blown their budget, but also would not have the space to put all these ships somewhere let alone man them or have the shore based infrastructure to operate them and arm them and man them... and they wouldn't have the support ships needed to keep them operational anywhere outside of Russian waters.

There is no hurry... and it is better to get this all done right, than to get it done now.

There will be a lot of new technologies they will be incorporating into these new types and just replacing most existing small ships and older vessels makes more sense moving forward.

Corvettes and Frigates made in serial production should not be a huge technical problem now that the propulsion systems are worked out, but new AESA radar arrays for ships as small as corvettes are going to improve the ability of each type to contribute to the overall C4ISTAR of the navy.

The new bigger ships will have other things added like S-500 and perhaps even Intermediate range semi ballistic hypersonic missiles with flight ranges of several thousand kilometres and of course flight speeds of mach 10 to mach 15 at 60-80km altitude, and laser defence systems that can dazzle or damage optics at extended ranges like satellites in space or drones and manned aircraft hundreds of kms away, and much closer physically destroy targets like hypersonic weapons.

Energy weapons could defeat guidance systems or disable warheads or set them off prematurely.

New large calibre guns might be the simplest and cheapest way to mount a swarm attack on an enemy force... with firing ranges of 250km plus and the ability to fire 60-120 rounds a minute and able to carry thousands of ready to fire round... I would suspect Russia will create drone swarms better than the west can and for a more reasonable price... they had anti ship missile swarms in the late 1970s...

They don't need that many and they don't need them that fast, so why bother with any Chinese built warships at all?

China and even India can make civilian ships if they need those faster... getting civilian ships into service quickly means generating international revenue for Russia sooner and faster which does make sense because that will create economic growth and help pay for the new navy they will be building.

China can make ships fast and India can make ships for all the Rupees the Russians have because of their trade surplus...

lancelot wrote:Russia could easily make cruisers if they wanted to. The problem is it makes no sense to have only cruisers and no small and medium size ships.
Just look at the nuclear icebreakers. Russia has the RITM-200 nuclear reactor. It also has nuclear-electric propulsion. The Baltic Shipyard which makes the nuclear icebreakers could easily do nuclear cruisers if the government wanted to.

They don't have space for that.
Russia modernizes its fleet at an unprecedented rate & speed.
This is why they are forced to prioritize production.
Baltic Shipyard is fully occupied till mid 30s, and will be constructing icebreakers and gas carriers.
It is Russia's priority.
Russkie had giant issues with their shipbuilding forever.
Even in the Soviet times, lacked the capacity for the construction of vessels, considering the giant Ukrainian yards included.
Everyone was building for the Soviets, which was Poland, East Germany, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Romania, Finland ...
They lacked some chain of supplies.
Like marine-grade cables.
Imagine that they are making those only for the last 2-3 years or so.
Russian marine industry skyrocketed in the last two decades, on a scale unimaginable even in the Soviet times.
The scale of its modernization is mindblowing. They are more self-sufficient rather than in any Soviet period given. Considering the fact that they had received two giant strikes in the back in the process is even more shocking.
We will have a giant shipyard cluster built on Kotelny Island quite soon, which will double the Zvezda production.
Zvezda alone is capable of building more tonnage rather than the entire Soviet shipbuilding.
Fleet will get as much attention as they will consider needed. And as they are a massive landmass and a land superpower, you can imagine the effect.

Everything to do with a navy takes decades of preparation... you can't just decide that next year you will start doing this or that and expect anything decent to happen in such a short time period.

The core of the issues is that they have most of what they need... so unlike the western navies they don't lack a decent Anti ship missile or a decent torpedo or a decent this that or other thing... they have modern SAMs and modern guns and modern radar and modern EO sensors and modern sonar and modern computing power and modern ship design capacity.

They have gone from cold war period specialised ship classes to modern 21st C modular multirole ships that are corvette and frigate sized.

If numbers were all that mattered they could have pumped out cold war era boats and subs and be fine with numbers... but be stuck with a rather ordinary fleet.

Things are expensive at the moment because everything is still new but everything is also standardised and modular and so once serial orders for ships and subs are given they should be able to ramp up production rather quickly once they decide what they want.

They need to replace their merchant marine fleet which takes up a lot of shipyard space and resources and at the same time they are trying to upgrade and improve their shipyards and train new people to use the new technology and new way of building ships.

They invested in South Korean ship building technology in the Zvezda shipyard and no doubt took note of French ship building practises when they made their portion of the hulls of the two Mistral class ships they had built, so it is not like the don't know how to make ships and subs... they do need to test and evaluate the designs they have made and the changes they have made to new versions laid down to decide which to mass produce, but once they decide on final designs the serial production should be much smoother and also cheaper and faster.


Other countries in BRICS that don't make their own ships might be customers further down the track as these Russian vessels are put into serial production and get a bit of experience under their belts.

lancelot wrote:Not really. The Baltic Shipyard can launch a Project 22220 icebreaker three years after they started laying the keel. They only plan to build seven of them. In 2027 the Leningrad should be launched. In 2028 the Stalingrad. And then they will be building nothing. The larger Leader class icebreakers are too large to build there. They are building them at Zvezda shipyard. The diesel icebreakers are built at Vyborg shipyard. So Baltic won't be building those either.
They could be building floating nuclear power plants. But those ship hulls have already been ordered from China. So they won't be building those either.
So what will the Baltic Shipyard be doing after the Leningrad is launched around 2027 then? Probably nuclear cruisers I think.
Even with delays the ship construction should start before 2030.

Rosatom plans to have 17 nuclear icebreakers by 2030. So you can easily add some more after 2027.
They have just floated a new 220m drydock in Turkey, not sure when it will be finally towed to the Baltic
But only by watching the planned cargo traffic on the NSR, it requires crazy expansion of the ice class carriers of a different types - just to imagine, this year they plan a 80mln T of cargo, 150 mln by 2030, and 220 mln by 2035 ...
This is what the Russian shipyards will be busy with in the next decade.
Only in 2023, the number of job offers in Russian shipbuilding increased by 23%, and they lack more than 22k personnel, 6000 of them in the Petersburg cluster. This rate is really insane.

As Europes economy collapses a lot of skilled shipbuilders might want to start learning Russian.....