Soviet Alternative Navy

[eswube]

Great looking design.

[erik_t]

The new 1159 looks great!

[Hood]

'Sverdlov (Modified)'-class, 1961

Four modified "Sverdlov" class cruisers of 13,500 tons light displacement were reported to be under construction at Leningrad early in 1959. They are believed to have been designed for guided missiles.

Drawing Notes: So said Jane's in 1960 but in reality the Sverdlov cruiser programme had been dead for several years but this detailed artist's impression makes an interesting companion to the real missile-armed conversions that the Soviets had briefly considered.
The drawing in Jane's is a detailed Pr.58bis line drawing with 'B' and 'X' turrets replaced by a twin-arm SAM launcher (perhaps an early interpretation of the SA-N-2?)and 'A' turret replaced by something that looks like an SS-N-1 'Scrubber' SSM launcher. Four cranes have been added to aid SAM reloading it seems. Notably no SAM fire-control sets are shown and the ship retains its gunnery directors, even the 'Knife Rest' aerial-search set was omitted.
Here I have added a basic set for SAM guidance atop the gunnery directors. The drawing is 95% Gollevainen's existing Pr.58bis drawing but with recoloured underwater hull, the addition of newer 130mm and 37mm parts and the changes for the missile armament.
(I briefly toyed with doing a complete updated P.58bis series but that's unlikely with my current progress on my worklist!)

[erik_t]

Sort of a head-scratcher, but there's only so much you can do to interpret someone else's sixty year old best guess of a ship that the host nation never actually drew up.

[Hood]

Sort of a head-scratcher, but there's only so much you can do to interpret someone else's sixty year old best guess of a ship that the host nation never actually drew up.

It is an odd one, all the more so given Western navies were developing missile destroyers and cruisers at this time and knew the kind of space and size requirements for the launchers and fire-control.
The drawing more or less implies a basic cruiser with three turrets removed and missiles plonked in their place on the same barbettes. Why 'Y' turret is retained is anyone's guess. It's an interesting window on Western thought on Soviet capabilities at the time, which is largely why I'm drawing these Western impressions - drawing them is always interesting to see the assumptions Western intelligence made.

[Gollevainen]

Why 'Y' turret is retained is anyone's guess

I once remember hearing a story about the real life command versions of the Pr.68Bis class command-version modifications. Two ships received this modification, Admiral Senyavin and Zhdanov. Senyavin's modification was done at Vladivostok where they had misinterpreted the work-order and removed both X and Y turret, while the original order called for removing just the X turret. Thus Senyavin was decided to be modify further with helicopter capability in place of the aft turrets. Not sure if this is really the case...but if so then its completely plausible for AU soviet cruiser to retain the Y turret

[Hood]

A couple more contemporary Western interpretations of how the Tbilisi-class might look on completion based on known sources.


Tbilisi, Project 1143.5, NATO 'Balcom-5' Class, 1990

Drawing Notes: This design comes a late 1980s (1989?) datasheet, oddly in Cyrillic text but clearly based on Western information, the class being identified by its 'Balcom-5' NATO designation. The specifications include 60 unspecified aircraft but the weaponry is odd being listed as 57mm and 30mm guns but actually twin AK-176s are shown - the entire island being more or less a cut and paste from the Kiev-series. The missiles are odder - SA-N-9 'Gauntlet' despite the inclusion of 'Top Dome' directors for SA-N-6 'Grumble'(!!) and SS-N-22 'Sunburn' SSMs which were never fitted to carriers nor were they vertically launched! So I made the decision to keep S-300F and switched the missiles to the real outfit.


Tbilisi, Project 1143.5, NATO 'Tbilisi' Class, 1990

Drawing Notes: This one is from Jane's Fighting Ships, circa 1990 and thus earlier than the one I previously drew. The drawing was a basic outline sketch but strongly followed the features of the source for the top drawing. The curious feature of the drawing was an array of 20x CIWS-type guns, some being larger than 30mm mounts. These may have been intended to show AKM-30 and what would become Kortik but this was unclear from the drawing so I took the decision to use the -30M as a change.

[emperor_andreas]

Beautiful ship!

[LEUT_East]

Beautiful design and atypically Russian.

[eswube]

Fantastic drawing!