That is what I am writing to you about, because that man will try in every way to justify what cannot be justified.
I am not justifying anything, I am explaining that the situation for ship building and military ship production in Russia is not the same as for the US or UK or France or China, and only children would complain they don't have as many as some other country has.
Like a full child wanting more icecream, not because they are hungry or even want more icecream, but because their brother got more...
I remember complaining on this board years ago and being lambasted about Russia needing to localize production of everything for their weapons procurement. And I ended up being correct in my thoughts. Now Russia is trying to replace with localized production for parts for ships, and mix with under funding for years, the shipyards aren't all great shape.
If Russia had cut off all western purchased when Putin took power Russia would be in a terrible state... in the 1990s Russia suffered horrendously losing people to high paying western companies exploiting their vulnerability and simple wish for a better life for their children and themselves... nothing was being made in Russia so to stay would be to learn to drive a taxi... then when Putin got into office he turned things around and started to rebuild Russia up to the point where it could stand on their own... having to invent and produce everything for themselves all at once is an impossible task for any country so they picked and selected technologies they wanted first and they bought those from overseas and produced them locally under licence till they absorbed the new technology and started developing it further for themselves with their own skills. No one would sell them state of the art anything, but things were for sale and things could be locally produced... in fact companies like French Thales were happy to let Russians make thermal imagers because they could make them cheaper than they could be made in the west so making them in Russia to sell to customers everywhere gave them a bigger profit margin and larger profits... and the same happened in most areas of technology... companies went to Russia to make money... now that made domestic production and domestic development hard because of the competition but now with western companies being forced to leave Russians can take over their businesses and in many cases the Russian government is funding Russians to fill the gaps left by western companies and that includes things like machine tools and 3D printers and other exotic things that make production faster and easier and cheaper that they can now apply to shipbuilding which they could not have used in the past.
Now they are in a much better situation to revert to Russian made stuff and the important stuff like diesel engines and gas turbines and other things like electric motors can be new designs that are actually better than the stuff the west was prepared to sell to Russia, and that is important... the west selling old model diesel engines makes them good money off old crap, but buying Chinese instead proved how hard it is to make decent diesel engines, so they invested what they had to to make Russian diesel engines and those will likely be available shortly in commercial volumes... remember it is not just military vessels but also commercial boats too that require these engines so the market is large and growing, which is good for those companies that invested in making these new Russian propulsion systems.
But a ship is complex, from the seats they use to the TV/video screens and computer screens and keyboards etc etc all have to be domestically sourced and produced, and that is not easy to organise, but the Russian Navy doesn't want thousands of Corvettes, so making 20 a year means you work for maybe five years and then you stop because they don't need any more... so WTF are you going to do then? Billions were spent upgrading your little shipyard... you are too small to make anything bigger...
Furthermore their propulsion system was made only in Nikolaev (so if they started to build them like crazy they would have ended up with much more than 3 hulls incapable of moving).
I know that probably by the end of this year or the next Nikolaev will be again in Russian hands, but at that point I doubt that much of the equipment in Zorya Mashproekt will Still exist and they will be able to produce the old but needed DS-71 cruise gas turbines, DT-59 boost gas turbines and associated reduction gears.
Even if they did capture it intact the orcs will shell it, there wont be active ship building there for quite a number of years and I suspect they might decide that the shipyards of former Ukraine (not counting Crimea) will only make civilian ships... and they need to build large numbers of those anyway so it is not like they wont be seriously busy for a long time even with full upgrades to modern production standards.
Possibly after the situation with country 404 is solved once and for all and the whole coast until the Danube is in Russian hands, new modern industries (including also branches of other existing Russian industries) to produce various naval equipment could also be gradually built there, helping so also with the current bottlenecks. I am not talking only of engines and reduction gears, but for all subcontractors for the whole ship production supply chain.
This conflict means the burning of all bridges to the west... even if peace broke out tomorrow things wont get back to normal any time soon... if ever... the west just spent 100 times more to destroy Russia and kill Russians than they ever spent in the 1990s to help Russia with its problems... they spent billions to liberate Russian oil from its territory, but to help the Russian people they didn't lift a finger.
So Russia, which built dozens of ships of project 1155 "Fregat", 956 "Sarych", 1135 "Burevestnik", SUDDENLY has no more crews for ships ?
So why are they modernizing Kuzentsov and Nakhimov ?
They have a certain number of sailors available to operate ships and all those ships you mention, and others have sailors, but if you want their shipyards to start pumping out hundreds of corvettes then they are going to have to build new piers for them to operate from, they are going to have to recruit a lot more sailors to sail them and they will need to spend trillions of rubles on all the new missiles they will be carrying in all those missile tubes, not to mention all those massive AESA radar arrays and EO turrets and systems and equipment.
It all costs money and takes time to make.
Right now they are spending that money on more useful things like the upgrade to the Kuznetsov and finishing the Nakhimov and maybe if that is successful an upgrade for the Peter The Great too... not to mention all the armour and helicopters they will need for their new 40Kt helicopter landing craft that will be hitting the water in a few years time.
And after all that, you add that the country that built the MOST nuclear submarines SUDDENLY doesn't need them anymore - submarines ?
They have plenty for defence already... SSKs are better for defence because they are less likely to wander off and being smaller and more manouverable in shallow waters makes them very deadly to SSNs and SSGNs.
The situation in the Russian Navy is really desperate and this SMO will have an additional bad effect on Russia's already inefficient shipbuilding.
The Russian Navy has not been terribly important up until now because most Russian international trade went through western subsidiaries on western ships with western insurance, so the Russian Navy was mostly self defence and therefore not a high priority.
What they did do was pay South Korea to build them a modern shipyard... just like the Russian Army paid a German company to build a digital training facility of the like very few HATO countries have... they were going to pay that German company to then make a new facility for each military district in Russia (so three or four more) but the German company was bound by western sanctions to stop building and so Russian companies took over and built the other facilities too and I rather suspect Russia will just do the same with shipyards... replicate the design and production processes for the shipyard the South Koreans designed and built for them in their other shipyards adopting the same production methods and new tooling and equipment to increase efficiency and potential.
Their main problem was lack of requirement, but these days they seem to have a huge demand for ship building that is outstripping the capacity to meet that demand, and they are opening up ports in the far north and of course gaining possession of ports in the Black Sea that could also be developed to meet the needs of the shipping requirements of the civil and military customers in Russia.
Obviously for civilian shipping they can order from Turkey and China knowing they should get what they ordered without Sanctions bullshit and also as a reward to those two countries for not imposing serious western sanctions on Russia in the past.
And when they have finally put the things working and improving - 2014 came.
Exactly... when you listen to Pod and others on this forum you might think that anyone can produce a modern mature engine design... it just takes production facilities and money... well when Russia could not buy German diesel engines they turned to China, who was licence producing German diesel engines and they had lots and lots of problems... maybe Germany was making some parts and withheld them from the Chinese for their Russian engines to the Chinese just made those important parts and that is why the engines failed... who knows... the fact of the matter is that even the Chinese can't just spend money and build a factory and start making reliable fuel efficient cheap diesel engines... because they didn't.
Russia is making their own replacement engines but doing that inside a 10 year period is working magic and should be respected, but Pod just complains like it should be easy... why not make 100 ships and then when the engines are ready you have 100 ships... well because 100 ships with no chance of engines is a waste of money and resources... better to spend that money on something else until new engines are ready.
Exactly, the Navy has been always down on the priority list for funding (even in soviet times).
They do a great job for very little money and it pisses me off when fanboys moan and complain like it is the navies fault the west and the ukrainians are a bunch of
.
Well the future of Russia will depend on international trade that does not go through western countries, so the Russian Navy is going to get very important soon...
I know that those small corvettes and patrol ships cannot replace larger ships, but they are building them quickly and they can cover a part of the missions (except antisub warfare).
Actually I would think protective ASW could be conducted by small boats in groups, with UKSK launchers carrying Otvet missiles and with the support of land based platforms like an upgraded Mi-14 perhaps based on the Mi-38, and perhaps even Be-200s with a dipping sonar that is able to land on the water surface and drop a dipping sonar to hunt subs through different layers of the water... any enemy sub found they could alert the smaller ships who could launch their Otvet ballistic rockets armed with modern homing torpedos... the old versions could reach 50km so it would not surprise me if the newer models could reach double that...
Russia has itself to blame for allowing itself to find itself without gas turbines..
Funding for new jet engines never stopped and they are in the process of putting into service several PD series civilian jet engines, not to mention continued development of military engines from the engine in the Tu-160 that is being upgraded in stages to the engines for the Flanker series which also got upgrades and improvements to the new generation second stage engine for the Su-57. They also upgraded the engines for the MiG-29 and new engines for their new light 5th gen fighter will also likely be shown soon now too.
The gas turbines the Ukraine used to provide to Russia for their naval ships are not new, Russia could simply select a brand new PD design in a suitable engine power rating and navalise that and get a vastly better propulsion system, but I suspect their destroyers and cruisers will be using nuclear propulsion and only use gas turbines for backup power supplies, so the question is... is it worth it?
Something they will have to decide because most civilian ships use diesel engines because of their efficiency and reliability.
Is it even worth developing new naval gas turbines?
The USSR collapsed 32 years ago and the same Russia (USSR) IMMEDIATELY after the Second World War and after great sacrifices in that war began to build a strong navy.
What you write about is not a justification, but the complete incompetence of Russia after 1991.
After the second world war the Soviets had to fight colonialism lead by the leading colonial powers of the US and Europe, but eastern europe was a market for their products and services.
1991 they started losing that market and compensated by trading with the west, but now that market is essentially gone too.
Russian decision to concentrate the assent on smaller hulls is perfectly clear.
If one only stop the ye bigger than better ideology.
These small ships are modular and multirole and very complex... even more complex and better armed than cold war destroyers like Udaloy and Sovremmeny class destroyers... getting the design and serial production right takes time and requires guns and missiles and sensors and engines and equipment to be working properly... but once they are working properly a frigate is just a corvette with more UKSK launchers and a bigger gun and more powerful propulsion and sensors, and a destroyer is bigger and more and more and more and a cruiser is a destroyer with enough missiles to defend itself and other ships on a voyage rather than a trip.
Destroyers and Cruisers will have huge radars and large very effective sonars and lots and lots of optics and other sensors and jammers and highly specialised equipment, but they wont be more multirole than the modern corvettes... they will just be better armed and better defended... and with greater endurance and staying power.
Mastering the small ships is critical before you move to larger ship designs.
Plus once you have corvettes and frigates then you can defend your own waters, that is priority number one... the next step is being able to defend Russian interests and access to foreign countries around the world and that needs destroyers and cruisers and aircraft carriers.
They don't need a fleet at all, if we consider the case from technical perspective.
Their internal waterways and smaller ships means they can defend themselves, but they could be isolated and squeezed if they can't go out to the oceans of the world and defend their interests in terms of trade and foreign relations.
What country is going to trade with Russia if that means the next day the US fleet arrives and blocks their ports and starts regime change attempts no matter how open and clumsy?
Sure Russia could send subs to deal with that but subs are snipers and when they are seen they are vulnerable, so you either sink some US ships or you do nothing, which is essentially an act of war.
Being able to send Peter the Great on an "exercise" to train with the locals would be a good opportunity to scare away the Americans, but sending a destroyer or three would be cheaper... and in the future having other surface ships that can operate around the world visiting allies and sailing past the UK a lot would be good for Russian trade... meaning it would pay for itself.
The good will generated by being able to send a helicopter carrier to small poor nations suffering flooding or wildfires or earthquakes or just civil war stupidity is important too... unlike the Americans the Russians could actually do some good and really help people in need... including people the west wouldn't help like Myanmar or North Korea or Cuba etc etc.
But the major issue is they went with Ukrianian engines while letting their domestic engine industry go stagnant till recently.
Ukraine was their traditional supplier, while their domestic engine industry was busy making other engine types.
Ukraine cutting Russia off just added more work to the Russian engine industry, which means a delay of a decade or so but when they are making marine engines they will likely be better than those made by the Ukraine and Russia will then be able to sell them to anyone they please without Ukrainian permission.
- Moskva, a cruiser with 64 s300 fort complexes, Vulcan Missiles, SHORAD, extensive radar was blown out of the sea by AshM, or worse an internal detonation or mines as some claim
Interesting that anti ship missiles can be so successful once and then never be used again... surely they would capitalise on their success and sink ship after ship after ship... unless they are lying... which has been the case with other claims they have made.
I suspect an S-300 launch might have gone wrong with such a weapon landing on the deck and burning and starting an internal fire that spread, which is also not good, but how would its armament and sensors help with that?
- the navy could not secure Snake Island and conduct landings for beachhead to help Russian army on the right bank
The navy secured Snake Island very quickly.... it is Kievs accounts that claim valiant defenders fighting back attack after attack...
And they kept the island until it could not be defended because it was in range from coastal artillery... well it is not worth trying to hold then because attacking is quick and easy and cheap and defence is hard and over time expensive, so they left... but not without first wiping out dozens of attempts by the orcs to retake it... killing off likely some of their best naval special forces troops in the process...
- VMF failed to prevent Kursk bridge attack
That is like blaming the US Navy for 11/9 attack on the twin towers or the pentagon...
Supposedly Zircon is this great missile, but the VKS launches Kinzhal instead
Kinzhal is Iskander and has been in mass production for the better part of a decade... the Kinzhal is a rocket powered missile.... who cares if US intel recovers the pieces and glues them all together.... with Zircon the US is desperate to find a mach 10 capable nose intake for a scramjet motor... why hand that to them on a plate?
I'd rather have su34, KA52, TU160, Su57, then a glorified port babysitter flotilla
If you want an air force but no navy then Russia is dead because you are isolating yourself from all the BRICS countries except China... without a navy you will need to conduct all your trade through China like you used to do it mostly through Europe and you hand control of your economy to China.
Thank God Ukraine does not have type 209 submarine from Kriegsmarine - we would be discussing much worse situation
Even if the Ukraine had a Ford class carrier with F-35s on board it would have been sunk in the first few days and would have zero value for Kiev except the pain of watching it burn...
A single sub does not make a navy just like giving Kiev some F-16s wont give them a working air force either... even if they got 500 F-22s they would be screwed.
Look at their amazing Leopard tanks... not even firing a shot... they form up at staging areas and on the way to the battlefield they get taken out by attack helicopters and drones and artillery and land mines.
It's their surface fleet that is abysmal
Their abysmal surface fleet is already better than Great Britains... who used to rule the waves... at least the Russian Navy has ships laid down being built and a future with more ship designs coming, the Royal Navy got two carriers but couldn't afford 12 destroyers as escorts so they only get 6 and those 6 spend time at port because of various faults...
Russia has about five cruisers on the books... two Orlan class and about three Atlant class.... how many cruisers does the UK or France have?
Russias surface fleet is patchy but it is growing and is being developed... its future is actually looking very good, but of course there are problems where shipyards that have not had any work suddenly find they have too much... and need funding too.
a landing force would have helped the rest of the army which was in Kherson and Krivoy Rog - but the VMF showed its colors
Rushed landings are always the best... NOT.
With the number of men involved in the conflict at that time trying to take more land would have left large areas vulnerable to counter attack... do you think Kiev getting more opportunities for successful counter attacks would be better for Russia?
Moskva died like any other ship would die against AsHm, the era of the large ship is over
Only Kiev claims that happened, so believe them all you like.
Zircon can be land based as well, but we have not seen the confidence in Zircon that we see in Kinzhal
Zircon is an anti ship missile whose technology is brand new and I doubt they are ready to share it with the Americans, especially now at a time when American cannot make Zircon like missiles yet... they don't know how... they don't have the materials and they don't know the shapes and designs of its scramjet motor or even the composition of its fuel... a bit of fuel tank lining would be worth more than gold to US intel.
Why hand it to them on a platter when Kinzhal works and gets the job done?
More importantly launching and flying a MiG-31K and then launching a Kinzhal means a target can be hit in a few minutes... faster than it would take say for a HATO radar to detect the launch and track the aircraft and then the missile and work out what is about to be hit and warn them with enough time to evacuate the building.
That is why it is so capable because even if they work out what the target is, it is most likely to kill the people inside because they wont have time to leave in the one or two minutes warning they end up getting... assuming they get any warning at all.
Flying from the Black Sea means a longer flight and therefore more warning.
And patrol ships are a scam, a ship of equal displacement like 22800 could do the same job and carry better weapons, even a pantsir on 22160 would be better then the shit they have been given,
You do understand that Russian waters need to be patrolled and monitored in peace time and in war time.
Most illegal fishermen don't require Pantsir systems.
Jury is out on Buyan, it can fire kalibr, but without air defense we are talking about a useless junk who's job can be done by TU95
Isn't that the anti piracy ship that can operate off the coast of africa at a fraction of the price of the Udaloy class destroyers they would otherwise have to send...
KH101 is launched every day at Ukraine, and Kalibr? Another show project
No one on the Russian side is talking about which are being used and I rather doubt the people on the other side would even know the difference...
Sorry but no. None of that explains the six years pause in starting construction for the new Project 20380 corvettes. There were too many claims back then that the ships were not able to sail in the seas properly (which proved to be BS). So they stopped building them for no good reason. Then they decided to build Project 20385 instead which caused even more delays because of Zaslon.
The new ships are vastly more expensive than the older less capable ships and I rather suspect they don't want to continue making the older ships because when funds finally become available they will end up with half a fleet of near already obsolete types and half brand new state of the art types.
Right now there is no need for an enormous fleet of ships... new or old... what they need to do is upgrade their shipyards and get them working properly and then get serial production going on tested ships that they know work.
In the case of Corvettes they have a few types but their different fleets have different needs so building several different boats at a time is fine, but with Frigates they don't know if their improved model is any good or not, and of course they use more diesels and gas turbines than corvettes do so the propulsion problems are multiplied, so slowing that down makes sense till the upgraded Gorshkov is in the water and can be tested.
This is one of the main causes for the current gap in terms of surface warships in Russia.
What gap?
They don't need to be sailing all over the globe just yet...
Besides India who else is Russia trading with by sea that would merit a blue ocean fleet with 60 nuke subs, 30 destroyers, and 3 aircraft carriers?
Rail links are important but the continent of Africa is desperate for trade ties with countries that are not the colonial west that has been screwing them for centuries... they won't look down their noses at you like you are something they stood on in the carpark like the Europeans and US and Canadians do.
Asia and Central and South America are also interested in trade too... what sort of waterproof trains are you going to need to get there?
And that's how it will be until the arctic ocean becomes a Caribbean paradise, but we will be long gone before then
The north sea route was supposed to facilitate trade between Asia and Europe, but Europes hostility to Russia means... fuckem... they can kiss Russias arse...
Russia should not help Europe trade cheaply with Asia, Russia should encourage Asia to trade via rail and ship to Russian northern ports to send goods to other places... a rail line through Iran or Turkey to Africa for instance, screw Europe.
Russia does not need a sea going Navy if they are happy to be isolated and cornered by her land based neighbours... Europe loves being the middle man in Russian exports to the world... they scalp a profit off work of the Russians from every transaction... about time that ended.
Russia food exports to the world are stuck in European ports because Russia does not have its own shipping or insurance.
Russia you produce energy, you don't need to buy ships or anything, we have the ships and you have the energy so you sell your energy to us and we sell our transport and insurance to you... we don't want you to have a monopoly on energy so we own a bit so we can control who you can sell to as well... that is why they were so sure their sanctions would work because they controlled the payment system and the distribution system and all that together meant they could dictate who Russia could sell their energy to.
Except when the Russians stopped shipping all those ships became redundant and then Russia bought up those ships that were costing those european companies money doing nothing, so Russia now has a fleet of ships the can use to ship their products, but they need insurance and to get their grain and fertiliser out of European ports...
They have lots of problems but most of their solutions will result in their needing a decent navy.... not a huge one, but a decent one...