Project 22800: "Karakurt" class missile ship

What I mean is to have corvettes with just surface to air capacities and antiship missiles. Send the 10 km from your shores and make a line of defences by espacing each corvette by the range of their missiles like 80 km from each other (if shtil has 40km range).

The defence of Russian territory is the job of Aerospace defence forces... why waste your navy to do that role?

And these corvettes can carry 40km range mach 2 ballistic torpedoes to take out any modern submarine without warning.. who says they lack ASW capability?

Making them better by restricting their armament to one job is not making them better, it is making them worse and less able to operate on their own or in small groups.

These vessels have excellent communications systems and even two vessels can cooperate like an IADS and share targets in the air, on land, on water, and under water.

Why make them weaker?

The defence of an attack with Tomahawks wont be centred around the Navy.... the navy will intercept anything that flys near them, but their key function will be to alert the Aerospace defence forces that an attack is underway.... shooting down lots of cruise missiles is no job for CIWS, just like it is not a primary job of TOR.


The Su-35s and MiG-31s will be the first line of defence and coastal SAM batteries will be the next, but every target those cruise missiles are after or fly near will have SAMs to defend them too.

Hopefully instead of wasting time trying to hit one or two cruise missiles those corvettes will be launching a few cruise missiles at the player that fired cruise missiles at Russia in the first place....

A much more productive role for them.

vMaybe the plateform is to small. I agree.

The platform is not too small, your expectations are too large... when was the last time a corvette won a war?

flamming_python wrote:

GunshipDemocracy wrote:I still dream about more anti sub stuff on 22800 though

Well you can start by giving it a Sonar then, so it can actually see the subs. But as it is it's packed to the gills already (same as the Buyan-M) - don't bother.

These are missile boats. Leave them be.

Russia does have multirole ships in this size range that are suited for ASW operations; the Project 22160 for example.. not to mention the larger 20380/20385 vessels.

Actually on 800t ship you can put all this stuff

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuo_Chiang-class_corvette

22160 has no ASW stuff yet. Id be happy if she has full corvette's equipment. ASW, ASchM, AAD maybe drone/light helo helipad?

Maybe, with <7 days endurance.

With all the crew feeding themselves with microwaves heated stuff and no medical facilities.

ASW missions require two key performances: quietness and endurance.

The first could be indipendent of displacement, the second one no.

From past, worldwide experiences, nothing short of 1300-1800 tons dislacement would suffice.

That assuming deployments in home waters only, i.e. within a few dozen miles from nearest shore, and a day's cruise from nearest home port.

Anything required to cruise farther should have far larger displacement.

Any, really any man on board a naval vessel, whatever his role onboard, should be cared for as in a two or three stars Lodge, nothing short of it.

Sailors are not, and should never be regarded as VDV's reckless guys.

They are just professionals, even the cooks. to be carefully papered under any circumstances.

Naval warfare is not about heroism and courage, is about professionalism and efficiency.

Isos wrote:they created Tor for destroying guided munition and in the navy they barely don't use them. Same with shtill. They are really cheap systems with great capabilities but don't use them efficiently. They mounted tor on a destroyer like Udaloy and shtill on Sovs while they could have build a single destroyer with both of them.

They just don't adopt the formidable IADS they have for they land forces to the navy forces. It would have been such a better navy if they did that. Even the S-300FM isn't use propelly. Look how china managed to put it into frigates and small destroy while russians are just putting it into the biggest ship they have ...

Russians didn't manage to put the S-300F anywhere, it was Soviets that managed to fit it in a few cruisers, and that's it. Concerning the Soviet approach to not combine and fuse Tor and Shtil on one single ship, it's testament of a "I have no idea what I'm doing" approach. And approach that nurtured useless spending on jobs programs, at the expense of naval capability, and spliting ASW and anti-ship capabilities between two different classes (Sov and Udaloy).

All that in the mid-to-late 1980s, when the entire world was moving on to multipurpose frigates, destroyers and then AAW assets with strong ASW and anti-ship component.

Peŕrier wrote:Naval warfare is not about heroism and courage, is about professionalism and efficiency.

How dare you talk some sense here? If I can fit 4 Kalibr VLS on my duck tub, then STFU man.

Actually no, multipurpose ships were and are conceived to operate along specialized ships.

In NATO's Navies, DDG are dedicated AAW ships, any Antiship or ASW capability is only an addition to core capabilities deployed by other vessels.

To cut short a long story, multirole frigates are the only real "multirole" ships in NATOs navies, the ASW frigates being specialized in ASW, and the DDGs in AAW.

Udaloy and Sovremenny were born out of the plan for an oceanic navy, broadly following the very same principle adopted by western navies, just larger because Soviet Navy, just as Russian Navy, is really short of foreign bases to give support to task forces deployed far from home bases.

Udaloys, actually, have been superb ships, dependable and well suited for long range missions.

Sovremennys have been plagued by their propulsion system, and maybe by a design choice to have them as a complement to AAW's capabilities provided by larger cruisers, instead of being conceived as the core of a task force's AAW defence.

Still nothing was wrong with the general concept, and if there is something that was wrong in the past, and will always prove to be wrong, is any credit given to the 'jeune ecole" Philosophy, i.e. the hope a large bunch of small and simple ships could put a fight against a few, large and fully equipped ships.

At sea, size does matter, always.

Peŕrier wrote:Still nothing was wrong with the general concept, and if there is something that was wrong in the past, and will always prove to be wrong, is any credit given to the 'jeune ecole" Philosophy, i.e. the hope a large bunch of small and simple ships could put a fight against a few, large and fully equipped ships

What went wrong for them was their idea not to integrate Shtil to all > 3,500 t frigates/destroyers. Udaloy lacks that very missile capability and yet it doesn't have the horrendous boilers of the Sov class. Either way both classes are severely lacking somewhere.

In any case the Russian Navy command appreciated so much the Udaloy, that they scrapped the last two vessels of the class while in construction during the 90s.

Isos wrote:Karakurt are however nice ships if they manage to put pantsir on it. You can't really make a small ship multi role that's why I proposed different sub classes for anti ship, anti air and ASW.

Karakurts and Buyan-M are amazing little boats, but for such assets to matter, they need to operate harmoniously with larger ASW and AAW assets. Otherwise such boats are in great peril. The three Grigorovich class and the single Slava in the BS fleet can somewhat plug that hole, but more needs to be done.

Isos wrote:

KiloGolf wrote:

Isos wrote:Karakurt are however nice ships if they manage to put pantsir on it. You can't really make a small ship multi role that's why I proposed different sub classes for anti ship, anti air and ASW.

Karakurts and Buyan-M are amazing little boats, but for such assets to matter, they need to operate harmoniously with larger ASW and AAW assets. Otherwise such boats are in great peril. The three Grigorovich class and the single Slava in the BS fleet can somewhat plug that hole, but more needs to be done.

Well if you want a strong navy you need to choose one class of frigates or destroyer and build lot of them not just 2 or 4 per class. Arleigh Burkes are not the best ships on the orld but when you have 70 of them you can do a lot. Kirov and slava are amazing but they have 4 of them and Nothing else to really support them.

It's time to build lot of gorshkov or even grigorovich or project 21956. That doesn't matter just build them.

Slava's are long past their prime so unless those things start getting some VLS they are in trouble the Russian navy would love to get rid of them but cannot since nothing new is on the horizon, the Soviets themselves never intended for the Slava to be active after all this time.

And it depends on which block of AG's you are even talking about AG's are among the best ships period sure they aren't the best in the world but no ship is the best in the world nothing like that exists.

There is nothing wrong with building frigates and DD's but you are right they need to start building alot of 5k plus ships now, corvettes no matter how well armed in the end are just corvettes

GunshipDemocracy wrote:

flamming_python wrote:

GunshipDemocracy wrote:I still dream about more anti sub stuff on 22800 though

Well you can start by giving it a Sonar then, so it can actually see the subs. But as it is it's packed to the gills already (same as the Buyan-M) - don't bother.
These are missile boats. Leave them be.
Russia does have multirole ships in this size range that are suited for ASW operations; the Project 22160 for example.. not to mention the larger 20380/20385 vessels.

Actually on 800t ship you can put all this stuff

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuo_Chiang-class_corvette

22160 has no ASW stuff yet. Id be happy if she has full corvette's  equipment. ASW, ASchM, AAD maybe drone/light helo  helipad?

Tiny gun, tiny missiles, tiny endurance, tiny range and no helicopter (pad is just for resupply)

22160 is patrol ship, it's job is to take the irrelevant workload off proper warships

As for ASW that's what 20380/20385/20386 are for

You could do more with Karakurt but only if you enlarge it, no going around it

KiloGolf wrote:

Peŕrier wrote:Still nothing was wrong with the general concept, and if there is something that was wrong in the past, and will always prove to be wrong, is any credit given to the 'jeune ecole" Philosophy, i.e. the hope a large bunch of small and simple ships could put a fight against a few, large and fully equipped ships

What went wrong for them was their idea not to integrate Shtil to all > 3,500 t frigates/destroyers. Udaloy lacks that very missile capability and yet it doesn't have the horrendous boilers of the Sov class. Either way both classes are severely lacking somewhere.

In any case the Russian Navy command appreciated so much the Udaloy, that they scrapped the last two vessels of the class while in construction during the 90s.

Yes about an effective SHORAD system, they were wrong not having implemented it onboard of destroyers (i.e, "large ASW ship" and similar per soviet
and russian definition), and they were wrong not having implemented at least a token antiship capability in the Udaloys.

The second mistake actually being amended with the so called "Udaloy II".

Nobody is perfect, and most leading navies have done and will do similar mistakes.

About value given to Udaloys, they scrapped two vessels amid the 90's economical and political turmoils, but charged them in the 2000s with almost all of long range missions, a testament to what value, from the 2000s up to now, Russian Navy gives to them.

Maybe RN changed its mind over time, still Udaloys proved to be fine and dependable ships.

If somebody prefers to send a Buyan 1K miles away from her homeport for whatever mission, he is in its own right.

But sending an Udaloy could prove itself a better choice, maybe?

About the Russian Navy being aimed to fight in home waters only, that could be the case.

But in the last 40 years most of all naval ships in the world didn't fight a single naval battle, while in the same time they performed hundreds if not thousands of other missions, often very far from their bases.

Just looking at the long voyage the two 20380s are performing in these very days, it could be questioned the lack of need for large and long endurance ships within Russian Navy and Russian diplomacy.

Speaking of universal launcher for anti-sea/air/land missiles, look what I just found:

Russia's UKSK VLS to be Replaced with Upgraded UKSK-M Systems

https://www.navyrecognition.com/index.php/news/defence-news/2017/november-2017-navy-naval-forces-defense-industry-technology-maritime-security-global-news/5738-russia-s-uksk-vls-to-be-replaced-with-upgraded-uksk-m-systems.html

PapaDragon wrote:
Speaking of universal launcher for anti-sea/air/land missiles, look what I just found:

Russia's UKSK VLS to be Replaced with Upgraded UKSK-M Systems

https://www.navyrecognition.com/index.php/news/defence-news/2017/november-2017-navy-naval-forces-defense-industry-technology-maritime-security-global-news/5738-russia-s-uksk-vls-to-be-replaced-with-upgraded-uksk-m-systems.html

That woud be interesting if sort range Redut, S-400/S-300 missiles and Buk ones will fit there...alternatively this will be death for Shtil-1 launchers

You didn't get it. I don't say its a weak ship, I just think that a anti air version deployed near the shores could a great job to stop cruose missile which are the first weapons used in a war and every country will have larger and larger stockes of them in the future.

Compared with the price of a small ship you could have bought an S-350 battery that could offer rather better performance with rather more ready to fire missiles and remain on station with no other potential jobs it could be doing, while a corvette would be and expensive waste just sitting a few kms off the coast waiting for cruise missiles to fly past.

Like I said you would be better off having a communications channel between the navy and the other branches of the Russian military where a corvette performing other duties might detect a few cruise missiles can pass that information on to the Russian Air Force and the Aerospace defence force as early warning tools.

As I mentioned the best way to coordinate a defence is with early warning and the combination of aircraft and ground based assets...

Ships have generally got other tasks they are involved with.

Aerospace defence works on the ground and their radars are limited by the environment.

The ADF includes ground based SAMs and radars but also very long range radars and satellite based sensors as well as aircraft at airfields... the A-50U and A-100s work with the ADF and Flankers and Foxhounds...

Not just Tor but also shtill. Yes it is their role.

TOR and Shtil are Army weapons.... not used by the ADF or Air Force.

The role of the SAMs on a ship are to defend the ship and the ships that ship operates with.

I didn't meant to stop using karakurt. Its a cheap corvette so you can have both versions. The karakurt with uksk can attack the ships that fired them but a line of defence of 20 anti air versions will enable you shot lot of missile.

Having only one type of vessel makes the most sense economically and having specialised versions is the opposite of what they are trying to do...

Mig 31 and su 35 won t stop a massive attack of 200 cruise missile by their own. It s just impossible. Aerospace def will also use tor and buk to destroy them but in an environment where the cruise missile have much more chances to go through...

Of course they could... that is what they are designed to do...

That is why they have the big powerful radars that can track and engage lots of targets at one time.. a group of 4 Foxhounds should be able to take on at least 20 cruise missiles, with 16 R-33s and 16 R-73s or R-77s. A single group of 4 Su-35s should be able to engage more than 30 at medium range.

They will launch more than 8 planes against a 200 missile strike... one A-50U could manage the defence directing all fighters in the area to intercept and alerting ground based SAMs as they approach for the best chance of interception.

Shtil is not a bad system but I think S-350/Redut make rather more sense in a more effective and compact system... once it is fully working... especially if it includes a short range IIR guided lock on after launch missile called Morfei that we used to hear about occasionally...

Isos wrote:
While with 20 corvettes, you can make a line where every flying target will must go through and your radars which are more powerfull than fighter radars will detect all of them. Like I said you can keep S-300/400 onthe coast for f-35/ but for cruise missile cheap Tor and Shtill are enough.

If you let the enemy go in your backyard hoping that you will shoot him down when he is there is non-sense.

There are several problems with such approach.

First, in the best case, any shipborne sensor would not see anything flying low at more than 40 Km.

That assuming the ship has a Mast high enough, otherwise max detection range would decrease according to the relative radar horizon.

Second, having 20 corvettes deployed would mean having another 30 or more in inventories, so costs would become huge anyway even if the single ship is quite cheap.

Third, for such ships to effectively at as forward AAW defense they would have to be integrated in a more comprehensive naval force, otherwise an enemy could just take down some of them selectively at start of hostilities, opening gaps in that forward line of defense.

Personally, I see such ships really useful to improve local area defense around key infrastructures like harbours, naval bases and any other high value target located on the seaside or very close to the sea.

But for a wide area defense, ground based SAMs and radar, A-50/100s and interceptors are likely the best if not only viable approach.

In case a need to bolster defenses in remote areas would arise, some serious ship, able to deploy Ka-31s and maybe UAVs would be a better choice, think of them as highly mobile and self-sustaining AAW infrastructures, with SAMs, ground (shipborne) and aerial sensors, and autonomous defense capabilities against any possible threat coming from air, surface or under the surface.

I agree the price would be a little high but the price of the S-350 will be high too. S-400 is almost 500 millions (price of a big frigate).

S-350 batteries would be less obvious and could stretch across the entire border... not just areas where there is water...

And you could move them around your territory as needed.

You can make the corvette cheaper by taking of the guns and the armour by building it to civilian standards.

You can make it cheaper by making it useless for anything but SAM picket, but why waste money on a ship that sits and waits for someone to attack Russia with lots of cruise missiles?

If they were fitted only with SAMs then a torpedo to sink them all just before NATO launches its cruise missile attack is probably what I would do and all that time and money is wasted.

In reality 200 missiles will be flying to their targets and you will have to refuel and rearm all of your fighter before lunching them.

NATO forces are watched 24/7... if they started moving cruise missile platforms close to Russia the Russians would likely notice.

There are ADF aircraft sitting ready armed and fuelled in case they are needed ready to take off... that is what the old PVO did.

The new ADF will be doing the same with long range radars looking for low flying threats...

Then they have to detect the missiles and shot all of them (they won't be flying togather you will have to look for each one).

Unless they use 200 separate platforms to launch the 200 missiles they wont actually be that far apart. They wont just fly directly to their targets either, which means they will route them the way they think will allow the most of them to get to their targets unseen, which will channel their flight paths considerably. Firing one and then firing one a half hour later would not be very effective... most targets will need several missiles to get any chance of a hit so these 200 missiles will all be on the move at the same time and most will be going to targets other missiles are attacking too.

As I said before a single group of 4 MiG-31s will each have 4 x R-33s and likely 4 R-73s all of which would be very effective against low flying cruise missiles and if attacked by 200 missiles it is more likely they will send 50 MiG-31s and not 4...

The likely targets those cruise missiles are flying towards will likely have their own ground based air defence forces too, and the sheer number of major SAM platforms in Russia means the odds of flying near one is very very high.

The time needed to get an AWACS aircraft airborne and light up all the aircraft and launch AF aircraft... I think you will find 200 cruise missiles is not nearly enough.

While with 20 corvettes, you can make a line where every flying target will must go through and your radars which are more powerfull than fighter radars will detect all of them. Like I said you can keep S-300/400 onthe coast for f-35/ but for cruise missile cheap Tor and Shtill are enough.

For cruise missiles even Igla-S is enough...

If you let the enemy go in your backyard hoping that you will shoot him down when he is there is non-sense.

Building 20 dedicated SAM picket corvettes to defend the very few cruise missiles that might actually come via a sea border is a bit silly.

Karakurt corvette have a displacement of around 800 t. They are really small ships! Despite being so small, they are really overpowered. Take a look at similar western corvettes...the displacement begins from 1200 t, under this value you find hardly a capable ship.

For their displacements Karakurts are great! Against air threats and subs something bigger is needed, frigate or destroyer, not a corvette. But with their missiles they are a really threat for other ships or land targets.

Converted Ohios are only four, and even if they are almost certainly pure conventional cruise's platforms, sending a former SSBN close to the shores of another nuclear power is not without risks of nuclear escalation even before they lauch a single, conventionally tipped cruise missile.

Anybody could imagine what could happen if just the other nuclear power suspects only that an opponent SSBN is approaching its coastline.

The risk such a move could be aimed to launch SLBMs as close as possible to their intended targets  reducing time of flight would mean putting strategic forces on the highest level of alert.

If somebody is willing to take such a dangerous approach, it's more than likely that will launch a nuclear attack at the very same time he launches conventional cruise missiles.

Anyway, shipborne radars are limited to <40 km detection range against low flying targets, so any number of cheap corvettes, with small displacement and in turn lower mast and shorter radar horizon, wouldn't be able to plug any gap.

The main weapon against cruise missiles are AWACS, and naval assets would be useful only if able to deploy AEW platforms like Ka-31 and having long range ARH SAM able to get mid course targeting data from the AEW until the SAM's own sensor can lock on the target.

Azi wrote:Karakurt corvette have a displacement of around 800 t. They are really small ships! Despite being so small, they are really overpowered. Take a look at similar western corvettes...the displacement begins from 1200 t, under this value you find hardly a capable ship.

For their displacements Karakurts are great! Against air threats and subs something bigger is needed, frigate or destroyer, not a corvette. But with their missiles they are a really threat for other ships or land targets.

Actually, Karakurt are in line with most of the world's corvettes in the ratio weapon/displacement.

They have no hangar and no helicopter support facilities, no ASW weapons and sensors, almost no AAW weapons.

They are mostly FAC, with cruise missiles taking the place of ASh missiles.