Project 1164 Atlant: Slava Class cruiser

The Slava class was a hack when it came out, basically a hodgepodge of already available systems, and is totally outdated today.

It was a backup design in case the Orlan class were not as good as they hoped.

With sensible upgrades it could be perfectly adequate for a range of roles, but they didn't want to spend the money.

A volley of 16 Vulcan missiles directed into Ukrainan territory could have been devastating against a range of targets... they likely have a few sitting in storage not doing anything important at the moment... replacing them with freshly made newer missiles would also improve potential for future conflicts because the newer missiles they make now are compatible with UKSK launchers so you wont need a dinosaur ship to launch the older missiles like they would if they wanted to fire them.

The Marshal Ustinov should have better electronics than the original ones. But that is about it. It still has the revolver and arm launchers. Which means these ships are highly vulnerable to saturation attacks.

The new fixed silo launchers would be the best solution and when the naval TOR fixed silo system is ready that will be ideal for the role.

The ground based TOR has excellent radar, but with a ship a massive AESA radar array with four faces all pointing in the directions of the compass with electronic scanning mounted up high on a ship and a naval TOR system would be outstanding in terms of performance...

It would also be good for monitoring airspace over significant distances in a more sustainable way than aircraft can manage.

It does not have it. Osa is the name of the system.

OSA was a good system... I am amused at western experts who call older Soviet systems obsolete like OSA, but ignore that in 1982 the British went to war with missiles like the Sea Slug and the Sea Cat, which were very very ordinary systems. Even the Sea Dart and Sea Wolf were not amazing in actual use...

Best end it could have. Now they have to replace it with a new ship, maybe the 4th unfinished Grigorovitch tht has no buyer yet.

The best solution would have been a proper upgrade and the retire it when its replacement ships are actually ready.

Those 16 p-500 are shit compare to 8 Zirkon that could fit in a Grigorovitch class.

They are not shit compared with most western anti ship missiles.... the Vulkans are big and heavy but also carry an enormous warhead designed to destroy targets rather than just disable them like most western Anti Ship Missiles.

They would also be potent land attack missiles because of their impact speed and just the weight of their warheads.

Buk-M3 is also way better than those S-300 from the 80s, specially against very low flying missiles even if it carries less missiles.

For a cruiser they would fit Redut launchers for S-400 and S-350 missiles... which would also allow point defence 9M100 missiles to be carried and used too.

The crew of 1 slava can be used for 2 Grigorovitch.

A ship the size of the Slava can carry rather more weapons and ammo than any Frigate...

It can also carry much larger sonar sets and much larger radar arrays and more jammers and more powerful guns too.

Slavas are not gonna be modernized anyway. Sending them to the bottom remove the need to take care of them after their service.

They should have been modernised... you wouldn't use a T-62 without armour and sensor upgrades, why would you use an old ship.

The only exception would be for naval gun support roles where you might take a Sverdlov out of retirement to have better naval gun support with it 152mm guns for coastal fire support roles... but these days their new 152mm guns are much better than any older ones fitted to their older ships so that would not make sense now either.

Those ships have only one advantage.
Used to be constructed as a flagmans, so have corresponding features, including space for flotilla command and special communication. That is one of the reasons that those have been even operated.

They are bigger than other ships and removing their electronics and replacing it with modern electronics would free up an enormous amount of internal space that could be used to add a range of extra things.

They don't need such ships in the blaack sea. Comms reach all the parts of the sea from ground.

The radar equipment on those old cruisers was pretty good and had excellent range. The large size of the ship meant the radar antenna were a bit higher off the water than with newer ships too.

Keeping a Slava to show a flag is beyond retard.

If they went to the trouble and expense of upgrading it then it would be an excellent ship to show the flag.

Either upgrade them with Poliment/Redut and uksk or replace them with better ships.

Their mistake was they did neither.

A single Gorshkov is better than those 3 Slava with their current weapons.

But a single Slava class ship given a decent upgrade is more use than 6 Gorshkov frigates in some roles... including defending itself.

Agreed, Project 22350 & 22350M will make a fine replacement for the Soviet era destroyers and frigates.

The Slava class is a cruiser and is intended to be a flagship that leads groups of Soviet ships away from Soviet waters.

So, in general, we can forget about the 22350M project in the coming years.

No. This split with the west means Russia is going to need to trade with the rest of the world and they wont be able to use western companies to trade through like they have. This means they will need their own fleet of ships and a navy that can protect them to a reasonable level anywhere in the world.

That means a decent navy is needed now more than ever before.

The frigates are way cheaper per unit than the nuclear submarines. You could build 4 or 5 frigates for the price of a single Yasen M. So I do not think money is the problem here. It is either supplier problems, or a failure of the shipyard itself.

It will be something that is going to get looked at sooner rather than later when they wonder why things are taking so long.

I suspect there is no rush to build ships in enormous numbers while the capacity to make propulsion systems is taking time to ramp up, and I rather suspect bigger ships will need bigger engines which will also take time, but they seemed to talk about new destroyers being nukes, though likely nuclear electric so that will require a bit of technology to be developed too.

They are headed in the right direction.

More expensive but also incomparably more complicated and complex.

If they can afford subs they can afford larger ships.

Of course what they learn from the new frigates and the improved new frigates will be important moving forward creating destroyers and cruisers.

Garry, what you describ is an upgraded Slava that doesn't exist. Only upgrade made was one radar of one of the Slava.

The lesson they should have learned is that nothing should be kept without upgrades... even rifles get improvements added over time to allow things to be attached or new scopes and attachments to make them easier to use or more effective.

A ship needs upgrades and improvements all the time.

When they were made... the Slava class and the Orlan class got upgrades as they were made... the first one was different from the last one made because as they made them they improved them and upgraded the technology.

In their current form they are quite useless. Their electronics is totally outclassed by mlre ones so tgeir radar wil be jammed effectively and their old missiles will struggle to hit stealthy and very low flying missiles.

Which is why they should have been upgraded, but the Osa and the 30mm gatling guns should have stopped subsonic anti ship missiles easily enough, which is why I think it was probably a misfiring S-300 that might have exploded on launch and started the fire... the explosion being propellant going off in large volumes rather than a HE warhead explosion from a missile which would have blown a huge hole in the ship.

P-500 are totally oudated. Any new SAM will easily intercept a huge missike flying straight at mach 2.5 with no RCS reduction and an old radar in the nose that will be jammed by any modern jammer.

Patriot and ground launched AMRAAM failed to shoot down Kh-22Ms in Ukraine, the Vulkan missile the Slavas carry is as fast and as potent as those missiles...

Having 16 of them is quite bad for modern days for such huge ships unless theiy are all nuks.

Merely a consequence of the size of the missiles... the British navy has as its biggest armed ship Frigates with 16 subsonic anti ship missiles... they don't really have enormous numbers of anti ship missiles on western ships these days... except the aging US big ships... the Zumwalt was supposed to replace them.

There is no difference for the radar or the AD missile

Nothing wrong with the S-300F, and while the Wasp is rather old, it is still capable of shooting down subsonic anti ship missiles... together with 30mm gatling guns it is not undefended.

Kh-22 is way faster and flies at very high altitudes, 27km and falls at mach 4.5. Kh-32 is flying 40km high out of reach of most missiles...

No it doesn't.

The Kh-22M is a mach 2.5 missile and flies at 22-25km altitude, the Kh-32 is the mach 4.5 missile that flies at 40km and is essentially uninterceptable because the only missiles that can reach it are designed to hit ballistic missiles not non ballistic missiles.

P-500 will have a low altitude, will go mach 2.5 max and has quite huge rcs. It's not a big threat anymore.

The Vulkan (P-1000) is what these ships carried, the Basalt has been retired for some time, and it has twice the flight range.

RCS is irrelevant because it flys low to evade radar detection.

They akready have 2 generation of replacement for them, Oniks and Zirkon.

Three, P-500 was replaced by the P-1000 Vulkan and then Onyx and now Zircon.

And in that time what has replaced the Harpoon and Exocet?

Not a lot.

Cirkon is an incredible jump, range over 1000km, speed up to 9M. In addition, probably like the P-700/800, it can attack in swarms, send information, among other things, with missiles, etc.

It probably can because the Russians are very cautious and very thorough, but it wouldn't need to be launched in large numbers and that is the difference with western missiles... you need to fire hundreds of western missiles to ensure something gets through... with Zircon you might launch two or three...

In fact a simple super cheap upgrade of the old Slava class would be missile tube liners to allow three Zircons to be loaded in each of the 16 Vulkan missile tubes... that would be 48 missiles... ironically if you only put one missile tube liner in each launch tube and had only 16 Zircons that would still be enough to cripple an entire US carrier battle group on its own.

Rip out the old huge S-300F system on the Slava and put in an enlarged version of Redut that carry S-400, and S-350 missiles and you have short and medium range active radar homing missiles with 10km range (9M100), 60km range (9M96) and 140km range (9M96E2) as well as 250km range S-400 and 400km range S-400 missiles. The original carried 96 missiles in 12 carousel launchers with 8 missiles in each carousel. All the empty space in 12 circles with 8 missile tubes means a fixed array mount could probably carry twice that number of ready to fire full sized missiles and four times more than that with the smallest missile types.

Replace the 30mm gun mounts with Pantsir and OSA with a new model TOR which could quadruple its missile numbers very easily as the current TOR missile is half the size of the original with 16 missiles in each vehicle instead of 8.

They didn't do it because they are spending money on other things and clearly didn't expect there to be war in the Black Sea any time soon.

They were wrong.

I would actually say a simple upgrade of the Slava class is possible and would be an opportunity to test new modern sensors and radars and sonars and other equipment they will be developing for their new destroyers. A chance to field test such things improves the performance of their navy now and takes a lot of the guesswork out of getting it to work when the ships designed for it are ready.

The problem with the Zumwalt was too many new things and when nothing is working you can't tell if it is your thing that isn't working properly or the things it is connected to are not working properly and is preventing your bit from working right. I rather suspect each company responsible for each piece of the puzzle likely got used to blaming everyone else so they didn't have to fix anything.

The requirements were also too ambitious, like a main gun that can fire a HE shell the same range as a cruise missile but be cheaper... ridiculous to start with.

Now the Russians have the 152mm naval gun working together with the Armys Coalition and its range is 70km now and they plan a subcalibre shell to reach 180km... which should be achievable and useful... and perhaps a 203mm gun for cruisers that can reach 250km or so... with precision that would allow naval gun support to be supplied to troops on the ground from a good distance away. The 120kg shell of a 203mm gun would allow a 40kg HE frag payload and 80kgs left for guidance and perhaps a scramjet motor to extend flight range to the long ranges they want... 40kgs would be enough weight for a nuclear warhead if required, and with decent guidance should be destructive enough for most targets as long as it hits accurately enough.

No Kh 22 and its various versions flew at speeds around hypersonic 4.5M

The airframe it self was offered in the 1990s as a high speed testing platform and was listed to mach 4.5, but the Kh-22 and Kh22M are mach 2.5 missiles that can achieve mach 3-3.5 in a dive... but they are manouvering so that would not be their max speed for a dive but manouvering reduces their chances of being hit more than just flying a bit faster.

Kh-22 is mach 4.5 when diving on it's target from 27km hiigh. A bit kess during the travel. It's way better than any 2.5mach missile. Back then and even today radar would struggle locking on such target and guiding a missile on it. Meanwhike mach 2.5 with big rcs is a common target for any radar.

Where are you getting your information from?

If the Kh-22 could fly at mach 4.5 then why bother with the Kh-32 which does fly at mach 4.5 and has new much more powerful liquid rocket fuel.

If the Kh-22 could fly at such speeds then the more powerful rocket fuel should mean the Kh-32 should fly much faster... it does not.

P-500/1000 will evade radar detection by flying low until the last 40km. Then it can go as low as 50cm from water it will be detected and shot down quite easily.

Yea, there is something at sea called waves... if you hit one at mach 2.5 you are not going to hit anything else.

The P-500 and P-1000 use speed to reduce time to deal with them, it does not matter if you detect them as they come over the horizon... they don't fly higher than about 7km altitude, so they will be flying at lower altitudes to reach their targets. When they were in service the US had two defences against anti ship missiles.... the Standard-2 SAM and the Phalanx CIWS... the Phalanx CIWS has proven to be ineffective against sea skimming targets moving at mach 1.8... the US Navy bought old model Kh-31s and called them MA-31 and tested them against Phalanx... which was useless... which is why they now use SeaRAM.

P-500 and P-1000 move at about mach 2 to mach 2.5 at sea level... Phalanx would be useless against them too.

Standard-2 was not designed to hit targets flying below 7m above the wave tops... which is why Sunburn SS-N-22 flys lower than that also at about mach 2 - 2.2.

Depending on the approach profile the Kh-22 can move at mach 2.5 at sea level or 3-3.5 in a dive because it is rocket powered... it has two rocket motors... a high power rocket motor to accelerate and a sustainer motor that maintains speed at altitude but uses rather less fuel. The high energy rocket motor is used at launch to accelerate and climb to flight altitude and then the sustainer motor takes over to get you to the target area without using too much fuel and then the high energy rocket motor lights up for the approach and attack dive on the target.

Being liquid fuelled rockets they can be started up and shut down as required.

The Kh-32 is the same missile with improvements and more powerful fuel.

And there is no armored missiles. That's the case for the nuk one to protect the warhead. A sakvo of 20mm bullets would damage the wings or aerodynamics so the missile will still have a big chance of going crazy.

Most have armour.... angled titanium plates in the nose in front of the warhead to prevent hits on the warhead that would destroy the missile with one shot.

These are supersonic missiles the wings are tiny... you might hit one but you are not going to get more than a second or two to get hits and by that time the missile is so close to the target it will probably hit it anyway... unless you hit the warhead and destroy the entire missile.

The nuk could ve detonated away from the ships so it didn't need to face the 20mm CIWSs. It's armor would protect against fragments from AD missiles most likely.

Phalanx can't fire vertically, and the rounds it fires are 50 cal lumps of DU. It has an effective range of up to 1.5km and fires at about 3,000rpm... a threat coming in at mach 2.5 is moving at about 850m/s so the Phalanx has about two seconds to bring it down... less because it wont get hits within 500m and if it doesn't hit it by then it will probably hit the ship anyway. These missiles have warheads of about 1 ton so even if you destroyed the warhead at 200m range it would damage the ship and kill anyone on deck near the point of explosion.

64 missiles in 8 packs.

Correct, I was thinking of the Orlan class...

The P-500 missiles were designed for salvo launches, allowing a submarine to fire eight missiles in quick succession, each controlled via a separate datalink.

All the Soviet Anti Ship missiles of the large variety did that... SS-N-12, SS-N-19, SS-N-22... the west is talking about doing the same with cruise missiles now... and it will be amazing and new...

Onyx has similar capabilities... Zircon might not need it... the whole point was that big missiles flying a supersonic speeds at altitude are going to be detected at fairly long range so their best bet at penetrating air defences is to fly below the radar horizon of the target vessels while one pops up and finds the targets with its radar and then drops back down and allocates targets to each missile in the group.

The enemy will detect the radar scan but will only be able to see one missile.

Zircon flys at high altitude all the way so such manouvers would be redundant, but then flying at 40km plus altitudes what are the enemy going to do to stop you as you get 3 kms closer every single second.

Big_Gazza wrote:...and the plasma envelope around the missile from its high-Mach flight absorbs radar waves and degrades detection/tracking by "standard" (ie Western) AD radars.  

Zircon is an anti-ship missile, so it will need to have a radar inside its nose cone, so that it can guide itself in the final phase of the attack against its main target, the ship. That said, the same plasma that would absorb the enemy AD radar waves would also absorb the Zircon's radar waves, making the missile as invisible as it is blind. The reality is that all assumptions involving plasma in hypersonic missiles are BS.

https://www.flightglobal.com/fixed-wing/plasma-blackout-is-not-a-worry-for-usas-hypersonic-missiles-pentagon/138539.article

...and the plasma envelope around the missile from its high-Mach flight absorbs radar waves and degrades detection/tracking by "standard" (ie Western) AD radars.

I am a bit skeptical about this plasma stuff some people talk about... Zircon was not designed to be a stealthy missile, it was designed to be very very fast.

It does not matter if you can track it... most western radars have problems tracking it because of their search radar scan rates... most search radars spin around relatively slow... maybe 12 revolutions per minute, which means one complete sweep every 5 seconds, so you detect a target and then 5 seconds later you scan that airspace to look for it again... but it is not where it was.... it has moved 15kms, and often the radar will have a hissy fit because the first target seems to have disappeared and a new target has appeared... and then on the next scan the first two targets are gone but a new target has appeared even closer.

That tracking information might be discarded as a glitch so nothing gets shown at all. Dismissed as noise.

The obvious problem is where do you plot the position of such a target because for the instant you scanned it it is there but from then on you know it is not... you might guess where it could be but the search radar wont tell you its direction or speed or altitude... it just detects the presence of the target... you then need to acquire the target with a tracking radar to get such details and its refresh rate will be faster, but if the target is faster than anything you can use to intercept it small changes in its flight means you are not going to get close unless you fill the sky with missiles.... you might get lucky... but the obvious problem then is how do you keep filling the skies with missiles every time the enemy launches a single missile at you?

There is just just a few missiles systems that can engge them. Not single euro missile can do it actually and for the US few SM missiles.

There is no evidence western missiles can intercept such targets... it is not just its speed... the S-400 can engage targets doing 4.8km/s but these are ballistic targets with predictable flight paths... the US SM missiles are also designed to intercept ballistic targets with predictable trajectories too... much like PAC-3 Patriot is supposed to be able to shoot down ballistic targets but has failed to shoot down most Russian missiles... even the subsonic missiles... it is not just about speed.... western SAMs don't seem to expect the missiles they are trying to hit to have jammers and decoy launchers and to manouver as they approach.

And there isn't that many radars that can track a hypersonic missile.

Many radars can do it, but for most civilian radars they don't track targets moving that fast because they are not interested in such targets.

An AESA radar can scan electronically so it updates the position of the target much much faster than a big heavy spinning radar antenna and it will work out that it is one thing moving very fast rather than a string of things appearing and then disappearing.

It becomes almost impossi le if it change direction and altitude randomly.

For a low update search radar yes, although at such speeds a turn of a few degrees is a high g turn so it wont be doing 180 degree turns or anything, but equally if you are trying to intercept it and it will take 40 seconds for your SAM to get to the calculated intercept point a 10 degree turn by the target could shift the intercept point by an enormous distance... 40 seconds of flight for Zircon is 120km, so the Zircon is 120km away and you launch your SAM to reach a point 120km in front of the Zircon and then your tracking radar notices the Zircon turns 5 degrees to the left... some very simple maths... you have a triangle with a 90 degree corner with one side 120km long and the angle of the triangle is 5 degrees... using a handy triangle calculator found here: https://www.calculator.net/triangle-calculator.html

That gives me the information that the intercept point has shifted 11 km to one side... does the SAM you have just launched have the fuel and speed to get to this new interception point 11km away in the remaining time? You turn your interceptor SAM and send it towards the new interception point and then your tracking radar tells you the Zircon has now turned ten degrees back the other way so the interception point is now 22km away on the other side of the original interception point... even if your SAM has the energy to get there it wont get there in time when the Zircon is there... game set match... and that is just two flight adjustments and more importantly this intercept point is 40km up in the air where very few SAMs can operate in the first place.

The speed is so high that the calculation is quite impossible because it goes out of the radar beam so you need to re-aquire it. Add some chaffs and the thing is a nightmare.

Tracking shouldn't be a problem... the problem is getting an interceptor missile to the intercept point at the correct time... even just a shift of one degree in its flight path can shift the intercept point by 1km and you don't get extra time to get there... most missiles that will be intercepting it have radar sensors in their nose so if you shift the interception point around too much the SAM you launched might even be able to reach the intercept point in time but because it is flying sideways parallel to the flight of the incoming missile it wont be able to get a lock and will miss it anyway.

When the target is moving at 3km per second a 0.01 second deviation in the intercept time means you miss the target by 30 metres.... and remember if your warhead explodes 30m behind the target the fragments from your exploding warhead will not catch the target and you will effectively miss it.

This probably applies for Onyx as well.

There were no plasma waves around the MiG-31 nor the SR-71, which fly at mach 2.86 and Mach 3.2 respectively so an Onyx or Yakhont or Brahmos flying at mach 2.5 to mach 3 is not going to have plasma around it either.

The only occasions where plasma is around an object because of its speed is thing coming out of orbit at much much higher speeds than these weapons we are discussing.

Now the Russians did experiment with plasma, but as far as I know the speed of the platforms meant they flew through the energised air and couldn't maintain a useful field of it in front of an aircraft for long enough to have an effect.

The plasma balls you get for your desk are glass balls with very exotic gasses with an electric current run through them. I have heard of suggestions that radar radomes are fitted with glass containers filled with the same exotic gasses that is sealed and obviously inside the nose of aircraft... the nose radome is transparent to radar waves so enemy radar penetrate the nose of the planes and hit the radar antenna which reflects back a relatively flat surface which gives an enormous radar return. Having a glass container filled with exotic gasses that you can run electric current through to make it a plasma would be easy... your own radar would not work through the plasma of course so the power from your engines that normally powers your radar can be rerouted into the glass container in the radome and generate a plasma to block enemy radar waves by absorbing them.

When you are using your own radar you use electricity in your radar and none in the plasma container so your radar waves go through the exotic gases and glass and radar transparent radome, but when you are not using your radar you can divert power into your plasma ball that blocks enemy radar from detecting your radar antenna.

And no, it does not make you glow in an IIR sensor... plasma does not need to be hot when it is generated electrically... those desk plasma balls are not thousands of degrees or they would burn your hand.

Western interceptors perhaps won't have much time. They'll need effective EW systems on board their ship for this.

Until they sort out a solution they need to understand even their most powerful carrier groups are vulnerable to a tiny Russian corvette armed with 8 Zircon missiles... all of which might get through no matter what you do.

The reality is that all assumptions involving plasma in hypersonic missiles are BS.

You need an enormous amount of heat before it becomes possible... however when it comes to enormous voltage, plasma absorbing radar becomes rather more viable... high power transmission lines are often difficult to detect with radar because of the plasma generated by very high voltages...