Chinese Navy potential threat for the Russian Navy

So the Russian fleet will be much more powerful despite the smaller size than that of the USSR fleet?

Of course.

In all aspects... just look at their aircraft in the 1970s... ground attack was basically dumb bombs and rockets from Su-17 and Su-25 and Su-24 and MiG-27 aircraft, and short range fighters were MiG-21 and their longer range fighters were MiG-23s with interception being MiG-25 and MiG-31... none of them were multi role and very few of them regularly operated with guided weapons except for AAMs.

Jump to now and all their aircraft are nominally multi role... the Su-34 can be a strike aircraft or a fighter with AAMs, the Su-25 has guided missiles, the fighters are now able to carry guided air to air and air to ground weapons of all sorts of varieties and sizes and they actually are buying them and using them.

In terms of their navy, they have gone from custom designed specialist role ships, to multi role... the difference is enormous.

Instead of buying anti ship destroyers (Sovremmeny class destroyers) and anti sub destroyers (Udaloy), they can buy frigates to perform their role... how many Sovs or Udaloys do they need? Their boats generally had primary weapons for a role and backup or defensive weapons so they could at least defend themselves in other situations... so the Sovs had torpedoes and RBU depth charges against subs, and the Udaloys main missile... the SS-N-14 had a backup anti ship mode so it wasn't a sitting duck in the case surface ships approached it, but the only ships they had that could be called multi role were their cruisers... the Kirovs had both anti sub SS-N-14s and anti ship SS-N-19s... and lots of other weapons to defend like RBUs and torpedos etc etc.

For their new ships it is simply a question of what sort of missile you load in to the tubes... you can be anti ship, anti sub, and land attack all at once... more importantly you have new up to date electronics and communications systems that allow you to find your targets and threats as well... the sort of sensors and communications only their big ships like the Slavas and the Kirovs had to collect and process all that data is now carried on corvette sized vessels.

So yes, the Russian navy will be much more powerful than the soviet navy, but lets face it... both were focussed on defending Soviet/Russian territory so taking on the US and NATO is not the goal... eliminating them locally to remove a threat could be their role though.

Yeah but that's a useless comparison. Frigates, destroyers and cruisers have also evolved and are still more powerfull than a corvette.

I disagree... the whole point of OSA type missile boats was a cheap little boat with the fire power of the broadside of a battleship salvo... they were never meant to be patrol ships or anti sub ships etc etc, they were a combat ship that could deliver a powerful blow but needed protection via other vessels or aircraft.

Today a corvette with a Zircon missile is as powerful as the most powerful US AEGIS class cruiser, because while that US cruiser can launch 100 anti ship missiles that should sink a Corvette, that corvette can launch a Zircon strike to sink that cruiser too...and right now neither could defend itself from the other under normal circumstances.

Yes the new China destroyer class 055 has 112 VLS

But most of those will be SAMs and none of them will stop a Zircon.

If you want to launch a missile you need a radar detection. 5 destroyers will come with 5-10 helicopters and will have the advantage.

No, you don't. To launch a missile you need to know the general location of the threat... a Zircon wont be flying at wave top height... it will be operating at high altitude... probably higher than 30km to minimise drag and increase speed so it will be able to look around for its own targets and pass that information back to the launch vessel and upload it to satellite.... even Granits could do that in the 1980s... it wasn't just a local network for the missiles in flight...

The only thing it can't face is a carrier group because they would be overwhelmed and for that reason Russia needs destroyers/cruisers and yasen with 32-40 VLS.

Only an idiot would suggest the Russian Navy only needs a single corvette, what we are talking about is not how a single corvette can take on all of NATO and win, we are talking about the impact of a new missile and its effect down to some of the smallest armed boats they operate... previously a corvette would not get a second glance from the commander of a US carrier group... but not being able to see what is in those launch tubes means he will have to treat even a tiny corvette with respect... that is quite a shift in power don't you agree?

Frigates will do the same work as corvettes but far away without coming to close from enemy country or carrier. But they need more weapons that can go further and better radars to see far away. Corvettes "long range" part is done by the air force or naval air wing.

The terms corvette and frigate have specific meaning and their actual designs are merging and changing... many of their new corvettes one could consider as replacements for older missile boats like OSA and Pauk, while corvettes are getting bigger and heavier, and indeed frigates are getting bigger and heavier too... as pointed out some new NATO frigates are as heavy as cold war destroyers... but with nothing like their armament...

If russia has no intention patroling far away but just countering US carriers then they only needs nuclear destroyer and cruisers and many corvettes.
If they want to also patrol far away then they need a balanced fleet with fewer corvettes, many frigates (that can also be used around their mainland) and some nuclear cruisers and no destroyers.

Traditionally the Soviets didn't have a lot of Frigates... many of their Krivaks were used by the MVD and KGB border patrol forces.

Their current corvettes have destroyer level armament but lack the range and endurance which makes them good for self defence, but to expand trade and commerce around the world they need cruisers and destroyers and a couple of flat tops.

But their basic weapons systems and radars are similar. Its kinda like a gun with 6 vs 14 rounds. You only need one kill shot. By spreading the capability into 3 smaller ships you can sail them in a triangle formation and cover a HUGE area, one gets hit you have 2 left. With a destroyer, one gets hit you are done. Plus the corvette will have a smaller radar sig as another +

Corvettes wont be replacing destroyers... simply having more weapons on board makes a ship better protected from attack and better able to deliver a blow... these new corvettes are impressive, but their cruisers are going to be something else...

China plans to build over 8 Type 055 destroyers. Russia will have one Nakhimov when they finally modernize it. Incomparable strength in favor of China.

The contents of one Corvettes UKSK launch tubes... ie 16 Zircon missiles would destroy all 8 of those chinese destroyers fairly easily, and while those 8 destroyers could probably easily overwhelm one corvette they likely wouldn't overwhelm an upgraded Kirov class cruiser... and its 80 Zircons could take out the Chinese navy on its own if it needed to, but it does not need to because China is not the problem...

Now Russia has in service only a few SSN.

The biggest threat to US carrier groups is not SSNs but SSKs... and they have some rather good ones of those with new types on the way.

No one wants to become like China while most countries in the world wants the US capitalist system (you can devate if it is a good or bad system but that's the reality).

US actions over the last thirty years (ie post cold war) have made most countries realise what a monster the US has become and if they don't sort their shit out more and more countries are going to stop drinking the Kool Aide, and look for alternatives... Africa and Central and South America are already looking for alternatives to the west and Russia and China and India as well as Brazil and South Africa are stepping up as an alternative that does not demand changes in laws to reduce competition and make multi national corporations more powerful and richer.

The Chinese as well have no desire, they only wish to create exclusion zones. The rest is trade on the Eurasian continent.

Exactly... China wants to shift trade from going through the med and the suez canal to going past Russia... it really isn't in their interests to try to pick a fight with Russia... no matter how much the US would drool and wet their pants over that.

So you are saying that a collection of 8 ships with almost 900 vls couldnt overwelm a single Kirov?

But those 8 ships are unlikely to be carrying only anti ship missiles in their missile tubes unless they want to be sitting ducks to anything the Russians care to launch back at them.

Probably more than half of those missile tubes will be SAMs for self defence and a half of the remaining tubes will need to be anti sub missiles to defend them from Russian submarines... which China certainly could not ignore if they are going after a single upgraded Kirov class ship.

So now we are talking about 250 perhaps missiles... and what sort of range do they need to get to to launch these missiles?

And Oscars are really SSGN and not SSN.

The SSNs were mentioned in regard to defending Russian surface ships from US carrier groups, so SSGNs should of course be included... in fact they will be an important component of the defence...

The YJ-18 is probably the preferd choice. 500+ km range with a terminal speed of 3,0 Mach.

Which fly at medium to high altitude and would rely on numbers to penetrate defences... the SAMs on the upgraded Kirov are optimised to engage such targets in enormous numbers... that is what they practise against.... their own high supersonic missiles...

That's assuming the missiles sink the ships and hit, modern-day DD's are very hard to sink even if you hit them. They are designed to take extensive damage and stay floating.

The Zircon is moving at almost 3km per second... which is roughly the detonation rate of RDX... effectively the impact speed of this missile is the equivalent of the detonation velocity of plastic explosive... even if it does not detonate its warhead it will still do some very serious damage to any target... to put it in perspective the APFSDS round from a 120mm Abrams tank is moving about half the speed of this missile...

However that window is about to close, soon all our DD's will have that capability.

Subsonic anti ship missiles... oooohhhh scary...

Can we get back on topic please?

Good point... back on topic people.

(even if maybe the whole discussion needs a new thread

I might start looking for a more suitable thread...

Thank you George...

1. So a minimum of 250 missiles fired from 8 different directions, and the Kirov would stop them all? Are they star destroyers?

The Kirov from the 1980s is the equivalent of about 96 S-300 missiles, which is the equivalent 24 launch vehicles... so about four batteries of S-300 plus 192 TOR missiles... which is basically the equivalent of 24 TOR launcher vehicles, which is another four batteries of TOR with 6 vehicles per battery... and that is ignoring the 8 Kashtan batteries... each of which has 32 Pantsir missiles and two 30mm gatling guns... and they are not just sitting in a field on their own... they are a fully integrated air defence network on one platform.

The upgraded Kirovs will be able to carry double the number of TOR missiles with twice the effective range and improved performance, because the new TOR missiles are half the size and each land based TOR system carries 16 missiles instead of 8 missiles it previously carried. It should be able to carry four times more S-350 missiles as it carried S-300s even with the existing launchers unchanged. With proper cell launchers it could probably carry even more because it will more efficiently fit those missiles in the space available... four times 96 means 384 missiles ready to fire, and with more efficient Redut cells I would add 1/3rd to the number of missiles simply because it uses the available space much more efficiently than the old revolver launchers that allowed under deck access to the missile tubes for testing and maintenance... which is all done electronically now... so 384 increased by 30 percent is about 500 missiles... active radar homing missiles of 60km and 150km range... plus the TOR missiles upgraded with twice the number previously carried because the new missiles are smaller and twice as many are carried in the same sized turret on the land based version... so that is another 384 missiles... they were already vertically packed but used an odd rotary launcher arrangement too, but lets just leave that at that... 500 S-350 missiles, plus 384 Tor based missiles, and of course the new Pantsir system has two 30mm gatling guns and 40 missiles per mount with 8 mounts... another 320 missiles.

So 500+384+320 = 1204 ready to fire missiles... of course those 500 S-350 missiles can be replaced in their tubes with four 9M100 short range IIR guided CIWS type missiles, so they likely wont carry 500 S-350s... a more realistic loadout will be reduced by a factor of four with a few 400km and 250km range full sized S-400s, but then increased again by a factor of four with a few tubes filled with 9M100 missiles too.

Plus of course 16 x 30mm gatling guns and the main guns... previously 130mm... who knows what calibre they might fit to these ships... perhaps 152mm Coalition based guns.

With three helos as standard one could be the Ka-31 to give extended air coverage down to low level out to 250kms for early warning...

Also we should take the capabilities of the upgraded Kirov a bit theoretically, it still has years of work left and I would not be suprised if it gets delayed even more. The type-055 destroyers are here now and looking at the speed the PLAN is growing the next generation destroyer is probably on the way by 2025.

Talking about what is here now... the Russians would never send a single Kirov class vessel out on its own to fight the Chinese or US Navy, and right now the solution would be a MiG-31 with a Zircon missile under its belly... hopefully after the first few ships are sunk the enemy will see sense and rethink their strategy and decide to talk instead of use force.

And most importantly with a Ka-31 in the air missiles coming in at wave top heights can be detected 250km out... so the S-350 upgraded SAMs can start destroying incoming missiles at 150km range or so... which means even if they can only handle 36 targets per battery, with the equivalent of 4 batteries that means 144 targets at a time... even if they are all launched to arrive at exactly the same time you can launch the missiles while the targets are out of range so when your SAMs get to 120-130km the target missiles have arrived there, so you can then launch another 144 missiles which should hit their targets at perhaps 70-80km, so that is potentially 288 targets already engaged and the rest will be at 70km range and closing... so a third salvo... perhaps of 50km range S-350s before the leakers enter the range of the Pantsir missiles... and then the TORs... and then the gatling guns.

Obviously you can't expect one kill per missile but experience in Syria shows their new missiles have rather good performance against such targets... and there is also jamming and other soft measures too.