Shipbucket

During the cold war some realy weird designs were proposed including this merchant looking ship with Polaris MK3 missile's.
She would have carried 8 polaris missile's in Vertical Launch Cells in cargo hold 1 , with an option for 8 more in a 2nd VL cell block.



Ships length arround 168 m , 21 m beam. not very much info , i will post some later.

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Awesome work!!

It actually makes some sense, assuming the soviet didn't know the existence. Good work!

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Interesting. The scheme I was aware of was for a NATO flagged, mutinationally crewed, class of converted merchant ships in a similar configuration to this project (if indeed it wasn't the very same). It would have certainly been cheaper than a submarine launched system, but with nowhere to hide.

@ rondondo: Well the soviets probely would have known that the US was trying this , because the soviets also were designing merchant ships with ballistic missile's. Nut i think it would have been a hard nut to crack for th KGB.

@ Portsmouthbill: I think they would have build multiple ships , flagged in multiple NATO coutries, i dont think the ship would fly a NATO flag because that would give it away , altrue it does have US Sealift Command stripings on its funnel, could be just a standard cargo vessel.

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In a sense, it could hide everywhere. On sonar and radar, it would just be another merchie.

Um....more and more interesting.

Re:
Agreed, the Soviets would have been onto this pronto, and would have naturally devoted a lot of assets to tracking any merchant ship wandering about without any port of call.
Sure, and I wasn't being literal about actually displaying the NATO flag; more that the vessels woul be under NATO command - hence the mutinational crew, and in itself one of the factors mitigating against the project - the USA would not have been keen to supply Polaris with the potential security risks.
I'm not so sure about this; the Soviets would have been following the movements of any suspicious ships, and in extremis would probably sink all merchant ships in the wrong spot and with similar displacement and appearance to the NATO 'Q' ships.

All very interesting, but never seriously considered as a viable project.

But they have a finite number of resources and every asset they deploy to hunt these ships down is one that isn't fighting other NATO assets. The ships themselves would have carried some cargo to simply blend into the background,

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They would have a total of 5 Cargo holds , two of them would be used for missile cells and other equiptment so the other 3 could be filled with standard cargo. Also these ships would have been fitted with a sonar transducer.

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Timothy has it exactly right. Tracking a fleet of merchants, any of which could carry real or decoy missiles without much notice, would be an outrageous PITA for a Soviet Navy that was logistically not well-designed to carry out extended and widely spaced blue-water tracking operations.