I've got a rant, one directed at Golly. <_<
Why are you using the Russian Designations for the Russian ships in the archive when Russian Designation are complete & utter gibberish and change with ship's class? I try to find say a Russian Destroyer, unless I know the actual class name of the specific ship I'm looking for, I have to look through all the images just to find it.
I've been told it's cause they're Russian Ships, but quite frankly, that's a bullshit reason. This is a Western site, using English, catering to a western populous.
Use Western Designations please... I'm going insane trying to find the right Russian Ships.
Becouse Western ship designation system is illogical mostly, and doesen't correspond at all into system that doesen't use it. Soviet ship designation system for soviet era ships is one of the most clearest, logical and simple naval ship designation system that there has ever been used in any navy. I could translate the prefixes and their abbrevations, but Im not lingvistically educated enough to do it, and its not commonly aknowledged practice in case of translations.
The system is easy to use, simple to use, and idiomatic to use. Only reason not to use it is becouse of ignorance, lazyness and complete arrogant disrespect towards the ships in question. I've never spoken, written or read russian, but I have also never have any proplems to use and know about the designation system nor had any proplems to actually pay some attention to it and learn to understand it.
As an example, destroyers are always called eskadreniee minonotzsie (sic! finnish transliteration) EM... and from Tsarist navy to Soviet Navy, all from Pr.1 to 56 are been called EMs, but only revival of the designation, and therefore destroyers in Soviet navy was the pr.956. Many ships between them, (pr. 56 variants, 57, 61 and even 1135) have been called destroyers (and cruisers and frigates even), when they have not been such ships. A large missile ship or large ASW is not a cruiser, its large missile ship or large ASW ship. Not only that its competent designation for the ships and their purpose, its most cruisal for anyone who wants to:
Know about the ships
understand the ships
or categorise the ships
to learn away from the false western designation frames that places ships in "wrong" or illogical categories causing false impressions, expectations and disapointments about some ship. Why compare a large ASW ship to an american nuclear powered fleet AAW escort (that they still stubournly calls a cruiser) and enjoy the comprasion triumph to the western side in terms of capabilities when similar win would have been achieved when comparing a minesweeper to an ASW corvette.
The first step in actually understanding and gaining knowledge of Soviet and Russian ships is to learn what the ships actually are, what they are called. Without that basic knowledge one cannot futher try to understand of why they are made that way and how do they work.
This proved out to be more of an counter rant of the general ignorance and cultural-arrogance that still prevails in too many people.