Upgraded Kirov class: Project 11442 [Admiral Nakhimov]

LMFS wrote:

kvs wrote:The main issue with ship reactors is refueling.  The refueling cycle is about 10 years.

https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/non-power-nuclear-applications/transport/nuclear-powered-ships.aspx

This article claims that US carrier reactors last 50 years and submarine reactors last 30-40 years.  That sounds about right.

In naval field apparently sometimes highly enriched fuel is used that allows to bring the refuelling cycle to 20 or 30 years, both US and Russia do this.

US CVNs have a mid life refuelling at 25 years but the new ones are good for 50 years, same with the new subs.

Well the fact of the matter is that all four Kirov class cruisers had nuclear reactors. The two they seem certain to want to upgrade are the easiest picks because their reactors seem to be running fine.

The Lazarev sounds like it had reactor problems, but think about it.

Whether you scrap it completely or take the reactor out and replace it... you are going to have to deal with the old reactor.

Whether you fix it or take it out and replace it or just take it out and scrap the ship you are going to have to take it out or continue using it.

Presumably they have new NPP designs they intend to use in future destroyers and cruisers and aircraft carriers... hell, they use them in icebreakers.

A compact NPP designed for military vessels that could also be used in subs would be a useful thing all round and a ship the size of the Lazarev is big enough to test one or two different designs at once.

For the original design they lacked a reactor powerful enough to push a ship that size around at full speed so they needed a system to boost available power for high speed dashes... new more powerful reactors would be the best solution in terms of performance... preferably just two would be best in terms of battle damage reduction, and this would be an excellent chance to test some viable systems.

At some stage you are going to have to develop new reactors anyway and this offers a chance to test and get some experience now.

If it turns out to be a dog... well they don't need to keep it in service forever... it could get improved reactors fitted later to try to correct the problems... and if they work much better then those reactors could be used to upgrade the other two Kirov types, or used in Destroyers so they are laid down with mature tested propulsion systems at the least.

With good design these new reactors could be good for 50 years operation with refuelling.

GarryB wrote:The Lazarev sounds like it had reactor problems, but think about it.

People keep saying this but it isn't true. Kirov/Uskakov has reactor problems, not Lazarev. Her reactor was de-fueled back in 2005 IIRC allowing her to be mothballed without infrastructure support, while Ushakov remains hot and tied up outside Zvezdochka under supervision.

So the 5th Kirov was cancelled and the CVN was cancelled. There is probably a good chance there is a reactor available that was made for these projects. Since the ship will be having major surgery anyway, maybe they will install a new reactor

Availability of OK-650 reactors should'nt be a problem as they powered everything from typhoons to icebreakers with them. BUT it's a nonsense to make a so heavy effort as needed to remove reactors from a surface ship for swapping them with new but same-old-design ones obliging to service that odd thermal boiler overheating "speed boosting" system too. Remember that that system was'nt an insane sophistication from a mad soviet party engineer but was necessary for that leviathans to reach speeds in excess of 26 knots that even with two OK-650 reactors at full throttle they don't sailed.
Definetely I think they'll never swap reactors only but in case of old reactors removal they'll remove the complete power plant in direction to gave that cruiser a full nuclear propulsion design with new generation, life(or at least half-life)fuelled, more reliable and more compact reactors; at this point if they don't want to put in there some conference hall, a gentlemen club or tennis courts they'll have so much room to store a ka-27 squadron or stuff it with even more sensors, shells and combat devices. BTW this is a total "poethic" path, a nuclear power plant swap on such a ship combined with the now already predictable (since nakhimov) modernization costs it's a fool just thinking at.

According to Wiki they use KN-3 reactors. I think the problem was how to throttle up the reactors quickly. They had 2x 300 MW reactors fer gawd sakes. Even at 30% conversion efficiency that is 280K SHP, and the ship is listed at 140K shp. So I suspect they run the reactors at about 30% power and 20Knots and the oil superheaters are there for response time...maybe they even only run one reactor at a time.

You're right, not Ok-650 but KN-3 reactors, BTW maybe you miss how much electrical energy consumes a combat station like that with all her sensors, hydraulics, electronics of her times, with very low efficiency for today standards, so it's not too wrong to assume that about half of her reactors thermal power was spent for electrical power generation (even less than 30% efficiency conversion).

It had seperate 4x3 MW turbo generators to power the ship. 12 MW is quite a bit of electrical power for a ship of that era.

By the time they will have S-600 in service...

I suspect the S-600 will replace Rocket propulsion with rocket/scramjet propulsion for much greater range and much higher flight speed for interceptions inside the atmosphere... rocket for outside of course.

So the 5th Kirov was cancelled and the CVN was cancelled. There is probably a good chance there is a reactor available that was made for these projects. Since the ship will be having major surgery anyway, maybe they will install a new reactor

There was another ship that used the same hull... it was huge and it was fitted with radar... it was either a spy ship or a space tracking ship... I seem to think it was only scrapped in the last few years... it was too expensive to operate for what it was...

The reality is that they have some very large ship available to them. It is going to be a while before they can afford to build brand new very large ships so for the moment these vessels are an opportunity to keep a long range ship capacity.

They don't have to be super ships with thousands of missiles, because they don't intend to keep them for the next 100 years.

They are not cheap... no big ship will ever be cheap.

Scrap them and you have nothing.

With an upgrade you get a ship able to travel anywhere in the world with decent self defence capacity on its own... remember cruiser sized ships are ships big enough to defend themselves and other ships around them simply because they have air defence missiles and guns in sufficient quantity and type to form a decent IADS on their own. Any other ship operating with them can coordinate their systems and sensors and weapons and make defence even stronger.

This is an opportunity to test new hardware that can be tested in labs but testing in labs is not the same as having it go to sea on a large ship.

Testing new propulsion and sensors and equipment and systems is hugely valuable and will make the new destroyers and new cruisers that they eventually build much better ships because they will be using tried and tested equipment that has been used together.

Imagine not finding out there were arrester gear problems on the K in Syria... imagine a confrontation at sea where it was found... that would have cost lives... which is why you test and why you exercise...

You're right, not Ok-650 but KN-3 reactors, BTW maybe you miss how much electrical energy consumes a combat station like that with all her sensors, hydraulics, electronics of her times, with very low efficiency for today standards, so it's not too wrong to assume that about half of her reactors thermal power was spent for electrical power generation (even less than 30% efficiency conversion).

And all new electrics... fiber optic cables for data transmission, and new electric drives that are rather more effective and efficient... replacing arm launchers and rotary internal launchers with fixed cell launchers... it all makes a difference...

But testing new reactor designs is worth it... even if they only try it on one ship... the purpose being more information and data for designing new cruisers and destroyers. If it works out really well they might consider applying it to the other Kirovs they are upgrading but even a big improvement might not be that important if it is expensive... it might be better to save the money and spend it on more frigates now and fast track the design of the all new destroyers and cruisers.

The point is that if they can test new reactors now on real ships their choices and decisions will have a more sound base in reality and they are less likely to cock the designs up.

The ship uses the same hull and reactor as the Kirov class but it was build from scratch. It was launched in 83 and finished in 89.

They could transform it into a civilian vessel. Cargo ship or tanker to use northern sea routes.

It would reduce operating cost on fuel.

Or maybe they can use it as a floating nuclear power plant and rent it to countries that need electricity.

Rosatom wants to sell the brandnew design (Lomonossov)

THey coulda built a CVN for the same $$

mnztr wrote:THey coulda built a CVN for the same $$

CVN doesn't generate revenue

Hole wrote:Rosatom wants to sell the brandnew design (Lomonossov)

There should plenty of client and this ship can't last forever.

They would need to offer it in the next few years for a 10 years operation untill more such ships are build.

They are building barges as far as I know and firstly for their operation in the Arctic. A ship handles the sea much better and could be leased to foreign countries.

That is it... the Ural...

AFAIK it was scrapped... too expensive to operate...

It would be big enough to put two NPPs on board... you could park it in some harbour somewhere and provide electrical power for the whole port... somewhere in the ME perhaps, but equally somewhere in Africa where stable power supplies would boost development...

Perhaps the Army could use it for trips to places around the world where there are strict gun controls... it could sail around the world and remain in international waters so say it came down here it could send large numbers of small boats to a New Zealand port for people to go out to international waters to look at the ship and fire machine guns and rifles and rocket launchers etc etc for a bit of fun... charge the people for the whole day... 2K would be a base ticket where you go out to international waters and fire a few guns yourself and can watch others fire weapons out into the open ocean... they could organise targets... heavily armoured seabased drones that could be sent out to any distance you like... you could have games with sniper rifles sending small armoured boats out to any distance you like.... 500m, 1,000m, 2,000m... you could have shooting competitions with rifles or machine guns or rocket launchers...

Then sail on to the next country.

I would think they would make a bit of money in Japan and even the UK where gun laws are tight.

I would think they could have all their newest and more obscure weapon types for collectors to get a chance to shoot... Maxims... even gatling guns...

Apparently it sat in port most of its life. housing its crew. The lack of port facilities meant it had to stay "hot" so it spent most of its life housing a couple of hundred crew at 100x the cost of the most luxurious cruise ship, such was the USSR.

Ural was limited in its service life as its super-computer was never sucessfully debugged (and its radar never worked properly), and its primary misison (sitting offshore US missile testing ranges snooping on US missile performances) became obsolete when test activity plummetted after the signing of arms control treaties.

She was a big expensive ship that didn't quite work, and had no real purpose anymore, and who cost a lot to operate. Hardly surprising that she was put in reserve and ultimately scrapped.

mnztr wrote:Apparently it sat in port most of its life. housing its crew. The lack of port facilities meant it had to stay "hot" so it spent most of its life housing a couple of hundred crew at 100x the cost of the most luxurious cruise ship, such was the USSR.

2 Billion for a ship but no 10 million for port facilities.

Hole wrote:

mnztr wrote:Apparently it sat in port most of its life. housing its crew. The lack of port facilities meant it had to stay "hot" so it spent most of its life housing a couple of hundred crew at 100x the cost of the most luxurious cruise ship, such was the USSR.

2 Billion for a ship but no 10 million for port facilities.

Like the man said, such was the USSR

Sounds absurd, but 2 billion dollars for something they would find useful, vs 10 million to keep available something they don't have any jobs for and don't plan to use... scrapping it made sense... so further money wasn't wasted on something with no use.

WE were talking about the USSR spending 2 bill. on a new ship but never building a pier for it so the ship had to use the reactor the whole time. Was the same with Kiev class carriers and some other ships which had to run part of their machinery to produce electricity, steam and so on.

Well to be fair, if the Ural was used as designed it would spend most of its time off the coast of the US spying.

Also in the Soviet Union the local authorities are hardly going to cut power to the navy for unpaid electricity bills... that just would not happen.

They did this nonsense most of the time including their brilliant sub with the liquid metal reactor. This one really needed special facilities but the golden fish did not get anything more then the rusted old dock

GarryB wrote:Well to be fair, if the Ural was used as designed it would spend most of its time off the coast of the US spying.

Also in the Soviet Union the local authorities are hardly going to cut power to the navy for unpaid electricity bills... that just would not happen.

But that was the problem: no connection to local grids. The ships had to run their machines which means the lifetime is reduced by years.