Her Sonar’s gone allright.
No Yasen for the moment as Gorshkov is in front of her hangar. Must be hard to get her out then 🙂

Stripping has gone some way, they’re probably doing some structural changes first. It’s cold outside there you know. And if you’d work on the outside first, you have more danger that your work is already degraded by the weather. Better do the inside first, then go to the outside, when it’s summer.

She was built to lift older submarines in distress out of the water. Like Wiskey and others. Now she’s too small (length of only 96m although she looks much larger than that due to her broad beam) and too weak to lift current subs out of the water so she was rebuilt for DSRV carriage.
So, yes she was indeed built as a catamaran to be able to carry out her task. She was built by Schelde in Flushing! I think the design is quite genious. The large cage structures are very low on weight, but still preserve the strength of the structure. The bridge on top gives a good horizon and operations control station too!

Ugly, but practical!

Here she is F260 Braunschweig. First of the German Klasse 130.

Agree with that, you can’t really judge stealth from the views of a ship only. A burke wouldn’t be very stealthy either, masts on top, regular hull design etc. Still the damn thing isn’t visible on a regular radar at about 3miles.

1/ T-45 : stealth, best radar, best SAM. Even if only 6 are built (12 sound a big oversized), thoses frigates should be awesome.
2/ Horizon : stealth, best SAM, decent radar.
3/ Nansen & F124 Sachsen : stealth, good overall system, long range missiles
3/ F-100 : good electronics, loads of SAM but not very discrete

Unknow ranking but promissing design : Steregushchy corvette

You can’t really judge on “stealth” of the above ships unless you encountered them. Nor can anyone judge on “best SAM” as we don’t know the characteristics. (and don’t come with, “oh, the books and the internet says it’s this or that” as that one doesn’t count, if a company wants to do promotion towards a country, they really won’t do it via the internet).
Stereguchiy has some very unstealthy features like the AK-630, it’s regular radars and the Kashtan, unless they come up with some stealthified turret, but even then I doubt it would come near most Western designs (and even Chinese), look at Talwar, a very fine hull, but all the clutter on top…

She’s not that big, a very standard VLCC, when you meet them, they always look the same, you can say “she’s 330m long” and won’t be further than 10m off… All same length,same beam, same draft, with some exceptions of course. The funniest being the King Alexander, which is 80m broad!!!
I guess when you’re next to one in a CG Cutter, they are indeed big, certainly when they’re in ballast, which was the case I suppose?

Maxpain you mention K329 for Belgorod (in the book)? K530 AFAIK, is a Delta I that was decommissioned, any idea whether the number was reassigned?
As for Belgorod, the last thing I hear, was that she still needed about $100mlln for her missile armament, but that they were yet to decide whether they’d put Granit in there, or something else (Oniks?).
As mentioned, Oniks would likely fit in the new Russian frigate type, by 2009. Of course, as Maxpain and I have mentioned, the specs of this frigate could be all made up by the press, their dream ship.

Some ports do handle her, Rotterdam for example. They also tried in Ningbo, but that s*cked, as the ship rises while she is discharging, the chicksan has to follow. But in Ningbo, the chicksan couldn’t follow, so they had to fill the gale tank, cargo tank 3 with ballast to keep her low enough and even then it was still troublesome. They won’t go back to Ningbo! Most of the ops are indeed done at sea, that doesn’t take away the fact that there are still port authorities controlling that though.

Bulkers would be fun, not an option for me though.

regards and Save seas to you too, maybe you’ll get smashed with your handymax under Ti Europe’s bow one day (I promise I’ll appologize when it happens 😉 )

And what has that to do with Kilo ???????

The soviets had 300 subs and had all the money or rather didnt care about money and they experimented with their Nuclear subs.

The fact remains that you dont tamper with the basic sub design , unless you are doing some experimental things.

No where did Rubin ever came up with the idea of adding an extra VLS module for a conventional Kilo sub.

It has about everything to do with Kilo. You say it’s nearly impossible without affecting this and that and that it would be very hard to do so. I say it isn’t and the Russians have pretty much proven that such conversions are not at all that hard. Russians experimented yes, but they knew they didn’t have all the money in the world to do that. They didn’t spend that much in their conversions, it was rather to save money and avoid building entirely new subs.

And PN wont use their freebies given by unkil sam ie P-3c to detect subs? This is the reason why IN subs long range missilles for land attack or even sea targets.

That is exactly what I had in mind. They only need one lucky moment and you lose a potentially important asset.
And how about some Agosta 90B that’s hanging around somewhere?
If they had such a silly ASW, then why would you care about your o-so-precious noise increament or speed reduction??? I think they will have taken such things in account and already considered whether they are worth the sacrifice (if it is there at all) or not.