One big remark there though, the ships I’m listing are just the vulnerable ships to real violent attacks with firearms, they are however not such likely targets since their freeboard is often much too high to board easily.
They seem to take whatever they can catch over there. It’s either the ship’s stores or the ransom they are after. Having a squad onboard is not really useful since you still retain the risk of a hostage situation. If they catch one of the crew off guard you’re special anti-piracy team can not do much except for letting them go. They’ll never do such things anyway since it has the same counterargument as the one they had back when Malacca straits was a disaster… Risk of escallation. They didn’t want to give the merchies weapons back then and they won’t do it now either. Whether it’s them who do the shooting or a squad onboard is rather unimportant. They’re just too scared that those pirates, when threatened will use RPG’s and heavier stuff.

ROE are indeed a complete disaster in this case, the simplest solution is warn and shoot if they don’t listen. Take a couple of pics of the dead *******s and spread in Somalia, that’s probably the only way to make them stop. The only thing those guys can lose is their lives and so that’s the only thing you can threaten them with.
I’ll tell you how they track them, the only really new security invention named AIS. Easy as hell. You have targets up to 300 miles and further with that. And you have the nicest information like draft, length, type of ship, speed, crew etc. I’m sure we can’t really make it easier for them.

That’s not a 094 at sea, that’s an old picture of a Delta III at sea.

Answer to that question is simple. Money and reputation. Would you honestly, as a government leader, like to spend a lot of money on something of a very dubious use and possible black hole in your military spending for the coming years? I doubt they’d really want to do that anytime soon. They seem to take an easy approach and only eyeing 2017 as a goal for any progress.

As for the Victor III, that’s normal. Do you think the Victor III could track an Ohio or LA when it didn’t know it was in the area? Of course not, they either had intelligence from someone near the base who knew when a particular sub was moving out, or, similar to US approach there was a Victor III waiting near the base. When they are just there, moving very slowly, any sub is hard to detect. Add to it that crew competence is something very important and that it could be that one captain that had such skills. That probably didn’t count for all their captains. In USN there were probably a lot more captains with such skills and when you have a much better boat you can do without a highly talented captain too.
Talented people just don’t need as much training as other people do to reach the same level of competence.

Crew life was very high regarded in Soviet Navy, why do you think they all had swimming pools etc. onboard. They could have saved the space and effort you know… Training is of course something different. Still today. Every Russian warship you see has an everage of 20’s as crew age. Don’t tell me they have much experience! Sometimes, the higher ranks are a little older and exceptionally you find an ex-Soviet onboard.

Yeah they did, by exchanging the reactor to a normal PWR, that’s all they did to it, not really solving the problem at hand though.

Add to it that it’s most likely that an SSK won’t make 12 knots anyway. As for Orko, practically during evasive manoeuvring, it’s already too late. for a ship or submarine to go from say 5kts to 20 kts will take a long time, for gas turbine ones that’s more or less ok, but diesel/ electric driven ships will still take a long time to speed up.

Possible indeed, I guess it depends on how much they have to adapt the Bazalt launchers for the Vulkan, or wether they need entirely new launchers.
The Specs of Vulkan are about the same as the ones of Bazalt. Hence the easy shift. Of course Vulkan has a much longer range and heavier warhead.

In total 5 Echo subs were converted with Vulkan (all out of service now) and Varyag. As UAZ mentioned, also Moskva might have Vulkan. We’ve seen pictures of Moskva loading missiles, but it was not really clear wether these were Vulkan or Bazalt. It would, in one way, be logical to continue production of Vulkan instead of Bazalt, but in another way it wouldn’t be so logical, since Bazalt is quite a proven missile, while Vulkan didn’t really complete testing or at least it didn’t have so much testing done. However, if Moskva is equipped with it too, they might indeed continue with Vulkan only.
Marshal Ustinov also received a new communications system somewhere back in 2005, the radomes seem to be the same shape as the ones on Velikiy.

Distiller, question one, that’s a yes. Russian subs can fire from the surface without a problem. Although it created some very strange adaptations of their design. The Delta IV for example, has a fat belly underneath the missile compartment to give more strength when launching from the surface.
As for Ohio’s they don’t have such strengthening and I’ve never seen them launch from the surface. While up till now, the Russian subs have been launching from the surface in most of their tests before they try to launch from below the surface. Normal maximum launching depth is about 50m I think.

Lawrence, the Russian Navy is well equipped for such tasks, they could easily send a much smaller Mirage or Mangust or even Tarantul to do the job. However, it is a very harsh climate (although I think their patrol boats are equipped for that anyway) and I think they just want show some force to make sure the Norwegians don’t come with anything bigger. A Mangust couldn’t do much against a Nansen or Skjold. An Udaloy or Slava will cause the Norwegians to think twice (well that’s of course what they are probably thinking, not sure which effect it will actually have though).

Oh, I forgot the main problem. Crew costs, those have about tripled by now. Amount of people stays the same, but the cost of keeping them has gone up a LOT. It’s just a ****ty job when you look at it. So now they’ve increased wages, time after time after time. Responsabilities are just too big nowadays and payment didn’t really take that in account until very recently. Contracts times for crew have also decreased. The philipino guys used to have contracts of 9-10 months onboard, now that decreased to 6 months. (and that’s a good thing for sure). Also for officers the times have decreased from 5 to 4 or 3 months. This all together causes a LOT more plane tickets to be booked, a lot more hotels to be paid etc. All together that’s a lot of extra money they are paying just to keep the same amount of ships crewed. And of course everybody is building ships like it’s nothing nowadays, finding and paying the crews for these is heavily underestimated…

Big joke.

Warships aren’t “big and heavy” compared to most merchant ships. They’re in fact lifeboats compared to them. The reason why merchant ships, and those are most likely either bulk carriers or ferries as mentioned, sink much more often is because they are simply much more often at sea. Warships just sit alongside most of their lives. Also economy is pushing the merchies further and further, merchies have to consider going through the storm or going around it. Warships just stay inside most of the time if there is any risk of a storm.

Ferries are not built cheaply as assumed here. They only have one big flaw, they have that car deck in the middle and that makes them extremely vulnerable to free floating surfaces. This is an effect of instability caused by a moving body of water. It’s the broadness of the open surface that is most important. In other ships they avoid this by adding longitudinal frames and avoiding partial loading, yet for car ferries that can only be done in a limited way. Bulkers have sort of the same problem along with the presence of large holds. Sometimes their vents break off in heavy weather and then water gets into the forward hold. This pulls the ship down and often they just break because of the heavy weight forward. Measures have now been taken to avoid that too.
Of couse such accidents happen more often with certain flags and in certain areas. That’s a different matter of course. Warships have a LOT of people onboard and can do a lot of maintenance while for merchies that is very limited. They often have to operate without spare parts and create their own stuff. Something that immediately becomes a big disaster and cause for “media concern” when it happens in some navy.