Because, you know, Kirov is far too small and unimpressive.
![[ img ]](http://i387.photobucket.com/albums/oo313/etylczak/CBGN-255mWL_wip008.png)
A few notes.
- General premise - rich, happy commies who like to spend lots of money on naval hardware even post-1991
. I envision this drawing to be circa 1995. - 255m length waterline, hence (file)name.
- Shading is somewhat non-standard, as is template size. Good thing I don't plan on getting it uploaded!
- A variety of components are non-standard or wholly made-up. Moving forward-aft:
- Moose Jaw along with late Udaloy's aft sonar arrays - probably sensible.
- Twin (side-by-side) 152mm weapon of the AK-130 design lineage - probably reasonable, although surely troublesome. I'm willing to claim 20rpm per barrel; this is less than what the USN hoped to hit with the last of the 6"/47DP lineage (25 rpm pb), but the turret isn't massively bigger than AK-130.
- Common 1m VLS cold-launch blocks, instead of the traditional S-300 revolver. Come in 4x2 blocks (like Mk 41). Extremely possible, and indeed shown (at least something like this) on many recent Russian designs. Note that 533mm weapons (that is, Klub) can dualpack in a 1m box. (128 cells)
- VLS cold-launch blocks of about 2m tube-diameter, in 2x1 block units of the same size as the 4x2 1m units. Could fit P-700 as near as I can tell. Probably sensible. (30 cells)
- Some phased-array gun director that is sitting on my Russian/Soviet parts sheet. Not sure where it's from.
- SKY WATCH actually works. This is probably not a huge stretch - I'm sure the radar system would have worked with sufficient funding and time. I am obviously assuming tons of both.
- Zaslon-heritage search/track/S-300-guidance; four fixed arrays. This is obviously the big leap of faith here. S-300 directors are already X-band, so that's not a big deal. Based on publicly available data, these should have about 2.3x the range of a standard Zaslon (3x the transmit area, 3x the receive area, 3x the power). Should be good enough range for any imagined S-300 variant, except perhaps low-RCS targets at very long range. Would it work? Again, with sufficient time and funding... I think so.
- Navalized Big Bird search/track arrays. Surely workable.
- A big enough reactor area for this whole sucker to be nuke. Probably doable. There were a number of large CGN designs floating around.
- More 1m VLS. (64 cells)
- Another Zaslon-heritage guidance set, this one trainable instead of a fixed array. Present for anti-saturation and backup use in case the primary cluster is damaged.
- Otherwise fairly Kirov-y: SA-N-9 in the corners, 6 Kortik CIWS, three helos aft, big VDS, tons of C&C space, etc etc etc. Four screws, though. It's a big damned boat.
- Missiles shown are SA-N-9, SA-N-11 (Kortik), Klub family, P-700, P-800, S-300 and 9M96E(2) (a real-life quadpack S-300-family weapon). SA-N-15 is not in the torpedo tubes, so that no onboard reload room need be provided. Klub serves fine in the ASW role.
- ESM/ECM/comms are as best I can figure from Golly's drawings and my old standby 1996/1997 World Naval Weapons Systems. Constructive criticism on this point in particular is greatly appreciated.