Got to go with Tinwing here….what would you modernise this monster into?.

Its a non-fun answer I’m sorry, but, Kirov was designed to do one job and that was to sit in the middle of the Atlantic and be a bloody nuisance to NATO vessels. It doesnt really make sense doing much else with the thing!.

Some kind of self-supporting arsenal ship perhaps?. I’d have to do the calculations but at a thumb-in-the air guess you’d get a couple of hundred 3s-14 Klub cells in the space occupied by the P-700 tubes. Filling those with LACM variants could make it a hugely powerful strike asset and I’d worry a LOT more about a ship with upwards of a hundred 3M-54E’s than I would 20 P-700’s in the antiship role.

Hugely expensive vessel to perform those kinds of missions in support of a real taskgroup centrepiece – a carrier – though.

Bang on the money, and add to that that her size was determined not by a desire to build a huge ship but by the fact that that was how big the ship had to be to carry all the required systems. Take away the AShM battery and what you are left with is less valuable than a Ticonderoga. Its all about that AShM battery.