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Russia Declassifies "Stealth" Warship
krez writes "Today's RFE/RL Newsline states The Russian Navy has declassified Project 20380, a warship designed with stealth technology. The ship has a range of 4000km, clips along at 30 knots (55 km/h). The ship has both offensive and defensive roles, and comes armed with the supersonic Yakhont first strike missiles, and the Medvedka 400mm anti-submarine missiles. This is a big step in Russia's attempt to re-establish itself as a world naval super-power, after a decade of budget cuts." Technical details are very very scant on here - if you know more, please post below.
This is really interesting- could it happen to be a coincidence that this is announced the same day that Bush announced the U.S. withdrawl from the missile treaty even though Putin said it was a bad idea? On a side note, there seems to be hardly anything about this on all the top news sites, but it was on the front page of my newspaper this morning. How could something so significant be ignored so quickly?
The future isn't what it used to be.
A visual search of even a thousand square miles (That's approx the possible area after 5 hours at 30 knots) would take a horrendous amount of time, and even then you'd have found one ship and would need the satellite to be fairly dedicated to tracking it.
Radar and sonar are still the only reliable ways to find ocean going vessels, and the technology to severely reduce the effectiveness of sonar has been around for quite a while. Adding radar mitigating tech to a ship is the last step to making it effectively dissapear, espacially with a few dozen of them around to track...
Think outside the... Hey, where'd the friggin' box go?
I the context of the Russian ship the pile of duct tape would work like this:
Hey, sonar shows a huge pile of duct tape approaching !
Hmmm, doesn't seem dangerous, just the ole russian crap...
Hey something goes off there !
What ?
Oh, seems like a ultrasonic miss...KABOOM
It's good when technology has a nice wrapping, but the most important thing about technology is that is works. Which is in fact the case for many russian things.
Owner of a Mensa membership card.
I would be extremely cautious in asessing the Russian Navy as "stupid". They are, and have been since the early 50's, one of two pre-eminent navies in the world. After WW2, in what was known as project paperclip, the US and USSR bargained over, and assimilated, prominent German scientists. They got many of the naval ones. Also, the Russian sub fleet is much stronger than the US fleet in many key ways, which can be easily researched (http://www.fas.org).
So of course they muffled the propulsion somehow.
There is already a stealth boat produced, and I am quite sure that it is not a secret. How do I know? Because I've seen it myself, and so has a lot of other people. Check out Smyge on google and you will know what I mean. Why aren't we then run over with these things? My guess is for the same reason as the US airforce doesn't only fly F117 (which I've also seen live ^_^) and B2s and why YF22/YF23 (dunno if they changed the designation) won't take over quite yet. Cost. We are talking about very expensive pieces of equipment with very very limited uses. It's time to sell farming equipment instead of weapons, the ones who buy need to feed their people!
The first thing is that when the ship is travelling it will leave a wake behind it. Also I believe that the wake will disturb the organisms in the ocean that emit light. Getting a satellite to find the wake wouldn't be too hard.
Also a moving ship will have a thermal signature from the exhausting of heat/smoke through the smoke stack. Again visible on satellites. But could be reduced by cooling the exhaust.
To make the ship invisible visually there's always the old dazzle paint jobs from WWII (look at an old photo of a warship from that era) that works by disrupting the visual signature of the ship.
I believe that also the lastest method is to "fog" the air around the ship by spraying seawater into a fine mist.
Any other ideas?
"He who controls The Information, Controls The World"
Check here for more info (in norwegian only, sorry) on the Skjold-class MTBs. I'm not sure when they will be ready though. The boats are propelled by water jets which means they can turn really really fast. The swedish navy is also getting stealthy boats, and they got water jets too.
Well, just to clarify, just because the ship is stealthy doens't mean that the reaction in the west should be to produce their own stealth ships. You don't need to react by mimic.
Instead, find out what the ship is designed for, its purpose. Stealth is not a purpose. In this case, the purpose is coastal defence. It is designed to be a defence against invasion. The west may not need a ship with the same purpose.
It helps to put it in perspective. My understanding of this subject is that after being brutally invaded in the last world war, the former USSR put a lot of money into defense against invasion, including patrol boats (such as this steath boat), coastal SSM and gun batteries, a huge anti-shipping marine air force (i.e. very long range bombers with ASM) and the military build up of a ground based defence in depth (i.e. the former Warsaw Pact). Perhaps they went over-board, but then i'm basised because my home country wasn't invaded in the last war.
As for what happens when all ships are stealthy? Well, i'm guessing that there is as much money going into detecting steathly vehicles (subs, ships, tanks, planes and missles) as there is going into building them. It's a battle between offense and defence that is as old as human civilization. As steath techniques make it difficult to detect using current radars, defence establishments will build new steath detecting radars (different frequencies, more power), or perhaps lasers. A good example that this stealth ship is not the beginning of the next dreadnaught-race, submarines have been near invisable for decades, but navies just learn to deal with the threat and continue operating.
In conclusion, i just don't see a need for an immediate reaction to a small (less than 2000 tons) patrol craft. Perhaps countries more fearing of sea-based invasion (ok, the UK would be on my list here, but also Germany and Japan come to mind). And that's not guessing at who the invader would be, but just a list of countries that would venerable.
-- Straights are for fast cars, corners are for fast drivers.
We've had it for a while
Of course, our Navy won't talk about it.
We've had it for a while and talked about it quite a bit. And decided it was silly.
A large stealth vessel was part of the original stealth project, and is well documented. (It was a very fast powered twin-hull, which gave them an opportunity to absorb or redirect the microwaves that got into the space UNDER the main body of the craft.)
The problem was that it DID work.
But the rough surface of the sea also reflects radar. The stealth craft blocked this. The net result was a dark streak on the radar background, with the stealth ship exactly at the end of the streak closest to the radar antenna.
Effectively it was a big, black arrowhead on a dim green background, pointing exactly at the stealth vessel. The only thing missing was a label saying "Stealth ship HERE".
To solve this you'd need to deliberately transmit a fake of a surface reflection behind you - which means that you need active ECM for EVERY radar that shines on you. Then you risk showing up as a spotlight on PASSIVE radar.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Re cently in the US Naval Institute's Proceedings, their monthly magazine, there was a great article describing how the amount of money that the Air Force recieves as a whole is staying the same, but their weapons of choice (F-22, B-2) are horrifically expensive. For instance, originally a force of 500-700 F-22s was envisioned by the Air Force when they decided to use the Lockheed variant of the F-22/23. However, due to budget overruns and contraints put on the program by the Air Force, that number has now shrunk to 150-250 aircraft. An analogous situation is happening with the B-2 - originally there were to be 200 of the long-range bombers. However, with current projections of $2B+ for each bomber, the number that the Air Force has for their force of B-2s is around 60, with very few of those bombers ever seeing combat, because who wants to risk a $2B bomber on a conventional bombing mission?
The overall effect of these expensive programs is to reduce the overall force structure of the Air Force. Even with the best technology in the world, a small number of planes can still be overrun by a larger number of planes. It has been suggested that the Air Force use something like the "high/low mix" that the Navy currently uses - the "high" being the multi-billion dollar carrier, with its power projection (read: ability to launch aircraft from anywhere), and the low being the much less costly guided missile frigate, with its land attack (Tomahawk), anti-surface and anti-submarine warfare capabilities. In the end, however, Congress will most likely end up giving more money to the Air Force.
Actually it doesn't cost much -- in rubles, that is. The Russia's legacy military-industrial complex is self-sufficient, as it does not require the services of private contractors. This gives them an opportunity to gain some share in the world's arms market. In 2000 the US held over 50% of the worldwide arms market with over $18 billion in sales. The next closest competitors were Russia with $7.7 billion, and France with sales valued at $4.1 billion.
Fwiw: Smyge was the first test platform in the Swedish stealth programme. Apparently it was successful enough that the Royal Swedish Navy decided to go ahead and order six corvettes based on Smyge technology. These corvettes have been dubbed the "Visby Class Corvette" (the first vessel built was the Visby, named after a Swedish city). The shipyard has some information about the Visby corvettes. The Visby naming ceremony, held in June 2000, was reported on by Jane's defense.
/cj
"Stealth ships" are a blue-water navy idea. But there hasn't been a major blue-water naval engagement in years. Today, the U.S. Navy is mostly used to project power onshore. Stealth isn't the primary criterion for that role. Armor matters more.
There's a good argument for heavily armored battleships for shore bombardment, but the old ones took thousands of people to run, and the Navy is short on people. The U.S. Navy had an "arsenal ship" concept in the early 1990s, but never built any.
The Kursk sank on a training mission, and according to a revealing and meticulously researched print article in the October, 2001 issue of Men's Journal, the two primary reasons for the tragic death of the entire crew were: 1) faulty cheaper torpedoes, and 2) a Russian fleet chain of command that put covering their asses before the welfare of their sailors.
The Russian Navy is in dire straits. Submarine crews spend much of their time foraging for food. Their morale is terrible, training quality is low, and discipline is not what it should be.
Having the best equipment in the world is no substitute for having well-trained, motivated, sailors. Until the Russians can completely overhaul their Cold War-oriented, top-heavy, political-appointee command structure, and start spending money on training and sailors rather than on huge new weapons programs, they'll continue their rapid descent into military irrelevance.
Further reading about the Russian military from sources around the world:
BBC
India
Russia
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