found this one today, I’ll have a look at the other message from a few months back concerning financing trouble of what I mentioned above.

MoD and the MoED have expressed a dissatisfaction on work Severnaya Verf
07.06.2006 12:19

This week Russian MoD and the Ministry of Economic Development publicly expressed dissatisfaction over the quality of the defense order fulfilled by Severnaya Verf. It is especially noteworthy that this was stated by the Vice Prime Minister Sergey Ivanov at the meeting of the government visited by the President Vladimir Putin. Sergey Ivanov said “the MoD and MERT has questions to these shipyards both from the point of view of the quality and the terms of fulfilling the defense orders and civil shipbuilding projects”. These are negative points that concern us, he added. According to him in recent years the shipyard receives substantial state financing. The Vice Prime Minister to raised again these questions at the regular meeting of the Russian Maritime Collegium held on June, 6 in SPb.

Naturally, these statements were immediately followed by the counter measures of Severnaya Verf. In particular, the management of the shipyard came to the meeting of the Maritime Collegium “with the proposal to finally make the order with timely financing the state orders”. According to the administration of the shipyard financing of the state orders is constantly suspended, cut and this leads to postponing the delivery dates, compensating the state under financing with the capital of the shareholders, increasing the costs of the constructions etc. In the press release of the shipyard its general director Alexander Buzakov expressed hope that the talks with Sergey Ivanov at the Maritime Collegium will clear up the situation.

Today SV builds and repairs 9 ships at the order of the MoD. However, only the 20380 project is financed properly. Serial manufacturing of the corvettes only require RUB5.5b in 2007.

Most interesting is that the same accusations of the Russian Vice Prime Minister also concerned Baltic Shipyard. Did these problems happen overnight? Definitely no. Some experts link this “sudden” attempt to solve the problems with the rumors released earlier this month regarding the Rosoboronexport’s policy to get the control over the two shipyards, who both belong to Mezhprombank. ROE is about to become a state corporation, which is likely to become a of a level of a federal institutions having the key role in military export and military-technical cooperation. It is indeed so temptious to conclude that “good state controlled ROE” is a better owner than “less good” private owners of the two principal shipyards in the country, which would be in line with the general policy of the Russian government to “collect the industry”.

News source: Shipbuilding.Ru

To be worth while it would need to be operable from existing vessels with minmal modification. A brand new missile would have to offer significant advantages to justify the expense of completely upgrading everything to support it. The only likelyhood of the latter would be with a breakthrough in propulsion making flight speeds of mach 8-10 viable with an ability to evade interception during its terminal dive. There are plenty of ATBM SAMs out there but a manouvering target flying at mach 8 would be a very difficult target indeed… even if you could track it from launch. Of course problems of airframe heating etc would need to be dealt with. etc.

And a 2m lengthened (and god knows what other adaptations for keeping its airodynamics and manoeuvrability) would not require such alterations? Again, your idea seems to me like a new missile…

Now that money is being spent they should have many programs defrosted…

The money that is being spent went to submarine development, Putin has repeatedly said that the Nuclear Submarine Arm is the most important and needs restructuring at the moment. And since the amount of money is limited, it will take a while for the rest of the fleet to really benefit from that.

Hmm, guess you guys are should be in some kind of “this-is-what-the-end-of-the-world-should-look-like-forum”. For both of you, I would stop this argumentation (merely based on, what he says is wrong cause he’s from US and what he says is so wrong cause he’s defending the Russians: we already know what your personal opinions are and frankly the truth is in none of them, please come back to earth now) for the sake of your already-badly-damaged reputations.

edit, there really is no obvious reason for Europe and US to be scared of Russia and honestly they aren’t scared of it either. There are other problems to be dealt with than this. (and yes Russia feels itself a bit demonized but so be it)

Insert a 2m plug with more fuel and alter the ramjet to scramjet for higher flight speed.

Garry, if it were that easy, then I think Pakistan and a whole lot of other countries would now have 200+ km Exocet and Harpoon missiles. It is quite a LOT more complicated then “just insert this and it’ll work”. I don’t think countries are keeping this huge amount of engineers to just “put in a plug”. The manoeuvrability and strength of that structure will be altered a lot if you “just” put in a 2m plug, same counts for that “just” finetune the ramjet etc. I think engineering is a bit more hard then that and unless you have a degree in such things, I don’t think you’ll be capable of putting such a plug in. Otherwise your goverment has made a huge mistake by not making you head of R&D in your country.

And would you think it’s justified to shoot 30 of these extremely expensive (and still doubtful) missiles at a simple group that you could actually kill with a couple of Harpoon sized (and cost) missiles? The long range of Granit and its predecessors and Vulkan, is just meant to be an anti-CVBG weapon, this kept them out of range of the aircraft. For any other SAG, for example Chinese, a much shorter range weapon would suffice (although we don’t know the exact range of YJ-83 yet).

If they would indeed want to justify such a missile system in service, they indeed could add land-attack capability to it. On the other hand, they could just push that huge space on Kirov full of Kh-55 or other cruise missiles too, that would give her quite some more punch in that role.

As for Moskva, she is already for quite some time in the Med each year. I guess they’re indeed just looking for a new base. (logistics will then be REALLY horrible)

Edit:

Russian Military Denies Seeking Mediterranean Naval Base in Syria

By AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE, MOSCOW

Russian military officials June 2 denied a report that Moscow hopes to create a permanent naval base in Syria that would give it a Mediterranean outpost and represent a major shift in the regional security balance.
Russia has begun work on deepening the Syrian port of Tartus and is also widening a channel in another Syrian port, Latakia, the Kommersant newspaper said, citing an official at Russia’s embassy in Damascus, Vladimir Zimin.
The newspaper noted that Russia is seeking alternative accommodation for the Black Sea fleet, based in the Ukrainian port of Sevastopol, as it may have to vacate that base when its lease expires in 2017.
”As an official at Russian naval headquarters explained, the creation in Tartus of a fully fledged naval base should help Russia redeploy the naval and supply ships leaving Sevastopol,” Kommersant said.
A base in Syria would be in addition to its expanding Black Sea military port at Novorossysk.
Tartus has hosted a supply point for the Soviet and then the Russian navies since the 1970s, the newspaper noted.
”This can’t be considered information — this is complete nonsense,” said an unnamed admiral quoted by the ITAR-TASS news agency.
”The Russian government hasn’t had and doesn’t have any plans to move the Black Sea fleet from Ukraine. Our fleet is staying in Crimea at least until 2017,” he said.
The agency quoted a “senior defense ministry” official as also denying the report: “One would have to be crazy to leave Ukraine before 2017. So why then sign an agreement?”
According to Kommersant, “For the first time since the Soviet Union’s collapse, Russia will create its own military base outside former Soviet borders, which will allow Moscow to conduct its own political game in the Middle East.”
The new Russian naval base in Syria would be protected by a long-range Russian air defense system, the S-300PMU-2 Favorit, staffed by Russian personnel, the newspaper said, citing an unnamed defense ministry official.
The system could also protect a significant portion of Syria, the paper said.
The newspaper said that a permanent base would help in Russian naval cooperation with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Russian ships are currently undergoing training to join a NATO counter-terrorism operation in the Mediterranean, Active Endeavour.
But a permanent naval base would also change “the disposition of forces in the region,” the paper noted.
”It means Russia henceforth taking the Syrian regime into its care and protection,” Kommersant said.
”Moscow’s stake in Damascus would definitely damage relations between Russia and Israel and could persuade the Iranian regime to be even less compliant in talks on the Iranian nuclear program,” the paper said.

So, seeing the Dutch and Belgian Dredgers all over the world, does that mean they will have bases there? Nice, now they should start finding ships for all those bases then. :diablo:

As far as Onyx/yakohant goes , India is presently developing a much improved 1000 Km Range of Brahmos called Super Brahmos , Dont see any reasons why the Russians cant do that with its Yakohant if it wants too

And will they succeed? Without doing too much work on it? Russia has the capabilities to build something totally new for such a range if they wanted to. They wouldn’t want to start adapting something old for that. I doubt India would be capable of cramming a enough stuff into a Brahmos to get a range 3x as much as the original range. If Russia can’t do it, then India will mostly not be able to do it either (given of course that they want to keep the dimetions, otherwise it’s not that hard of course) As for Granit, she has some titanium parts for defence, they won’t really change much on her structure if they want to keep such features. Changing the electronics is not as easy as it looks. Granit is a very complicated system with communications among units on the battleground etc. If you change one component you’ll have to change a lot of them.

And who said they weren’t going for a killing Oscar with, say, 72 Onyx missiles? Wouldn’t be entirely impossible. Look at what they did with Berkut… It would bring the Oscars closer to their target, but against PLAN, which is the most likely enemy for now, it will suffice to kill an entire battlegroup. The Nakhimov news isn’t that new btw, such a conversion was already mentioned last year. I guess we’ll see what comes out.

How does Yakhont strike you? There is already a submarine launched version of that missile… range is significantly less, but the space based guidance is pretty new, and since Granit’s space based component is nearly dead, so I wouldn’t be surprised if they would go for Yakhont as a standardised missile. There are some talks about the replacement of the Vulkan system onboard Varyag too, I wonder with what system. Maybe they will finally start standardizing their equipment to get rid of that logistical headache.

Haha, I scanned some old pics:
the swimming stadion (as you can see, again a problem of having enough blocks of the same colour):

the imaginative battleship, not being aware of current position. It has two helicopters, something like 6 twin SAM launchers, one Octuple SAM launcher, a whole bunch of guns and 9 main guns in three turrets. The middle helicopter deck could be lowered inside where the helicopter had its spot and then put back up. You can also see some Mirage planes in the first picture.

The Osa I talked about, with a Flanker on the right on the floor:

And of course the self engineered ball, which could actually roll without collapsing. that took me a lot of time to figure out how to do that.

Now I have evolved all in 1/700