Project 1164 Atlant: Slava Class cruiser

Completly stupid. They could have get some money and they said no just to spend huge money not leting it sink in their port and paying for scraping.

You can lead a horse to water but you cannot make him drink springs to mind... as well as the story of the greedy dog with a bone that is crossing a bridge and looks down in the water and sees another dog with a bone so he barks at the dog to try to scare it so it can steal its bone... there is a splash and his bone and the other dogs bone disappear...

Looks like Moskova is done overhaul.

The main features of these ships is that they are big and can go on long voyages without needing constant resupply support... they don't need to be arsenal ships with hundreds or thousands of vertical launch systems.

They had Rif and Klintok missiles so replacing them with Redut and the new TOR missiles should actually be relatively simple and easy and reasonably cheap... both the old systems were vertical launch but did not use a fixed cell based system... they had rotary mounts with missiles that were aligned with hatches for launches. A fixed cell system should be simpler and much much cheaper and enable a fairly significant increase in the number of weapons carried while using the available volume of space much more efficiently.

For the main armament there is an angled UKSK launcher that could replace each Vulcan missile pairing, so instead of 16 Vulcans they could have 8 x UKSK launchers which is a serious improvement in that it can take a mix of anti ship, anti sub and land attack missiles in any combination required with up to 64 missiles... which is plenty... especially including weapons like Zircon and even Onyx.

They would therefore need new radars and communications equipment but those would be useful anyway...

I guess it really comes down to how much more life they can expect from these ships at 37 years old. What is their physical condition like. To justify a major upgrade they would need at least 15 years more of life I would guess.

That is important, but there is no real value in spending an enormous amount of money on these ships... their value is that they are big and have good endurance, and big long endurance ships wont be in production for a few years yet so make these do.

Russia does not need super arsenal ships right now, for a relatively small amount of money they can upgrade the electronics which would free up an enormous amount of space and try a few new weapons systems and sensors they might be planning for new Destroyers and Cruisers further down the track.

Just replacing the Rif and TOR SAMs with new models and upgrading radar and sonar and they will be good as Russia gets corvettes and frigates into production in useful numbers and get ready for a destroyer design to be built and tested.

Those wings are for supersonic flight at low altitude so as that ramjet spools up and accelerates it it will certainly need a bit of angle of attack... but that is the equivalent of a light fighter aircraft... in fact it is probably heavier than any single engined fighter aircraft from WWII at max takeoff weight... and it is essentially taking off without a runway...

I seem to remember in the 60s or 70s they were looking at zero launch options... ie getting aircraft airborne without runways.

One of the options was a mounting stand that looked like an SA-2 Missile launch mount with a single aircraft... Su-7 or MiG-21 or similar with huge solid rocket boosters that look similar to the two being used to launch the Vulkan in this video.

Quite spectacular and of course once the solid rocket boosters burn out the aircraft had to increase their angle of attack with full AB engaged to continue to accelerate and climb away.

I would think another important issue with this missile is that it likely was going for a medium to high flight profile so the sooner it climbs the faster it will go and the further it will go.

Impressive stuff.