Soviet Century/Cold War 2020 AU

citizen lambda

Post subject: Re: Soviet Century/Cold War 2020 AU - Pr.404 & 2238

Posted: November 30th, 2016, 3:53 pm

Posts: 467
Joined: March 2nd, 2016, 8:30 pm

Pr.404

Faced with the rising cost and displacement of missile ships and the subsequent reduction in at-sea platform available for massed attacks, the Soviet Navy ordered design offices in the 2000s to come up with low-displacement replacement proposals for the Pr.1234 and Pr.1241 large missile boats and ships in service. Advances in anti-ship missiles, propulsion and control systems underlined a desire to bring back an equivalent of the ubiquitous Project 205 missile of the 1960s, a 40+ knot, low-manning 250-ton boat that could be manufactured by the hundreds and widely exported.
Classic planing-hull and hydrofoil designs were rejected early in the selection process due to concerns of stability and life expectancy, while no displacement-hull proposals were put forward due to the overwhelming speed requirements.
In the end, the leading design used a second-generation catamaran cavity-foil design developed from Project 1239. The low displacements allowed for a mostly composite integrated construction, itself geared towards signature reduction and aerodynamics.
The resulting 275-ton boat carried only eight missiles and no DP gun, and while the originally planned Uran missiles had been replaced in production by the high-supersonic, semi-ballistic Rubin by the time the first Pr.404 boat entered service, operational tests quickly showed the limited potential of the design. After a few years, production switched to the larger Project 2238 before picking up for good. Of the ten ships built between 2006 and 2011, one was lost to an engine fire after only a few years, and six were later converted for KGB Border Guard service, with the anti-ship armament removed and replaced with berth for a pair of rigid raiding craft, the attendant crane and additional housing, while the forward CIWS was replaced with a legacy Vikhr-launching AK-306. Most served in the Far East and Pacific border district, carrying out search-and-seizure missions along the Amur river, the coast near North Korea and the Kuriles archipelago.

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Pr.2238

This larger third-generation cavity-foil hovercraft was designed in parallel with Project 404 as a heavier counterpart, initially as a private venture by the Zelenodolsk KB for a future large missile boat requirement.
Upsetting the prevailing assumptions behind the requirement for Pr.404, comparative field trials gave the heavier Pr.2238 the advantage.
Advances in signature reduction made the larger size of the boat tactically irrelevant, while granting it better habitability and firepower, against a limited cost increase from the hull and power plant. Crucially, the Pr.2238 hull could carry a medium-caliber dual-purpose gun, while the Pr.404 was limited to 30mm CIWS mountings. While survivability in the face of battle damage was an alien concept for both boat classes, the larger and heavier Pr.2238 benefited from some amount of inherent redundancy by requiring double amounts of some critical systems like lift fans and trunk intakes. The missile loadout was also doubled, reducing the baseline requirement in hulls and crews. Once again, the large missile boat had prevailed over the missile cutter, re-tracing in condensed form the evolution of the earlier Soviet classes. Transition from the light Pr.404 to the heavy Pr.2238 was eased by the close relation between both designs.

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A Pr.2238.1 variant equipped with heavier long-range AShMs (both Oniks-PU and Tsirkon-S could be carried) was quickly developed, requiring only the remodeling of the missile bins, mountings and some air intakes. This variant would be produced in much lower numbers than the original though, for mostly the same reasons that had spelled the end of the high-speed MPK: a 50-knot platform is not required to carry 300-mile-range missiles in most coastal defense scenarios. At great expense, these missile boats had become the tactical equivalent of the third-generation SSBNs, being able to hit their targets without even leaving port.
In a similar development, and in contrast with previous generations, no attempt was made to create a specific anti-submarine version of the Pr.2238 BRKAVP. By the time it entered service, the missile launch and control systems had evolved enough to allow the baseline missile version a fully multi-mission loadout if called for. The extensive network of coastal underwater sensors deployed by the USSR since the 1990s, as well as the abundance of patrol boats and aircraft geared for ASW detection, enabled missile-carrying boats to engage submarine contacts even without dedicated on-board sensors.

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Soviet Century/Cold War 2020 Alternate Universe: Soviet and other Cold War designs 1990-2020.
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