GarryB Wed Sep 16, 2020 3:32 am
And best way to do it is to start building Gorshkovs in additional shipyard
They will need to do that sooner or later even just to get experience making new ships.... if they only have one shipyard making new ships then it will take quite a while before they get to new cruisers...
True but they also need destroyers.
Once they have upgraded the Udaloys and Slavas and Kirovs that they want to upgrade they should have enough larger ships for a period... more frigates and corvettes will get them right for coastal defence and patrol, and then the shipyards can switch to destroyers and cruisers... which will likely be nuclear powered and need different propulsion and would probably benefit most from all electric propulsion...
And finally if they do commit to upgrading Lazarov it should be done in parallel with Peter the Great side by side otherwise by the time both are done Nakhimov will be ready for retirement and they'd be back to square one
Actually I would think the best thing to do would be to use it as an all electric drive ship and remove its entire and relatively complex propulsion system and replace it with a new high power nuclear power generation system... with their new destroyers and cruisers they will likely need to be working with all electric drives and nuclear propulsion anyway, so a nice big ship... they will have five other big ships if they need them, and they can learn with a full sized test dummy.
If it all goes tits up and is bloody useless... it would be hardly a critical loss to the navy to have two Kirovs instead of three... and it is an excellent chance to make a serious step forward in naval technology... and if it works well then can be used to further upgrade the other two Kirovs...
With old ships it is impossible to know to 100% in what condition the hidden parts are...
You can learn a lot from solving problems... but building brand new from scratch can still have problems you wont find until they are clearly a problem... like your engine cooling system doesn't work in the med because the water temperature is too high to cool the engine... just for instance.
Perhaps one of the two that they were not going to modernise can be used as the basis for testing new propulsion systems, or all electric drives...