Missile cruisers are a fairly new type of ships that did not grow out of classic cruisers with a rich biography, but formed a separate direction in world shipbuilding based on destroyer squadrons. A special place in their development was taken by a subclass of atomic warships.
And since they were created to conduct a nuclear missile war, they did not have traditional constructive protection. And the part of the displacement intended for heavy armor was absorbed by more and more new types of weapons with their changed volumes and energy consumption, as well as crew rooms, which also changed requirements, especially on ships intended for long autonomous navigation.
Project "Orlan"
The project was based on the premise of creating an ocean-going ship of unlimited autonomy, which was supposed to search and then destroy nuclear submarines on the expanses of the World Ocean.
The Leningrad Northern Design Bureau received the technical specifications for the development of a new project, which was called "Orlan" and number 1144. The project provided a local scheme for protecting the most important types of weapons from the effects of a missile strike. Therefore, most of the weapons were hidden under the deck.
The main enemy of the new ship was supposed to be powerful enemy aircraft. And to combat it, air defense systems of various operating principles and calibers were introduced into the armament. Anti-ship missiles were designed to deal with aircraft carriers.
Project 1144 was very long in time, supplemented and revised. The appearance of a multi-purpose warship loomed more clearly. At one stage, the future ship received the final classification, it became a heavy nuclear missile cruiser.
The Orlan ships of the project abroad have no analogues (he received the Kirov-class battlecruiser designation by the name of the first TARK abroad). The total displacement of the cruiser is almost 26 thousand tons, while even the non-serial missile cruiser with the Long Beach nuclear power plant of the US Navy is one and a half times less.
The government of the Soviet Union decided to build four warships of this class.
After laying the first cruiser, the project was finalized, and the next three cruisers were built according to project 11442. All ships differ in type and quantity of weapons. It was assumed that all ships would be equipped with a new project, but not all types of weapons were put into mass production and added as soon as they were ready. Therefore, only the last cruiser corresponds to the project almost completely.
Ships of project 1144
TARK "Kirov", founded in 1977 in the spring, went into operation in the last days of 1980. In 1992, he was included in the Northern Fleet of the Navy of the Russian Federation under the new name "Admiral Ushakov" and was decommissioned in 2004. Now awaiting disposal.
The next was the Frunze, laid down in the summer of 1978 and commissioned in the fall of 1984. The ship’s new name is Admiral Lazarev. The nuclear cruiser, the only ship of the Orlan project, served in the Pacific Fleet.
TARK “Kalinin” was laid with some lag, in the spring of 1983, it entered service in late 1988. Later it became known as "Admiral Nakhimov." Now it is under repair in Severodvinsk and will be transferred to the Northern Fleet in 2018.
Admiral Lazarev, an atomic cruiser whose modernization can begin only after the first ship of the series is utilized in Severodvinsk or completes the reconstruction and leaves for the Admiral Nakhimov duty station, is waiting for its fate to be decided at the mooring wall of the remodel in the Pacific Ocean .
The construction of the fourth ship, the completion of the first stage of which was the collapse of the USSR and in this regard, a sharp reduction in funding, lasted for many years. Laid down in 1986, it entered service only in 1998. But now the flagship of the Northern Fleet, Peter the Great, is the only one serving.
Cruiser Specifications
So, the current Admiral Lazarev, an atomic cruiser with a length of 252, a width of 28.5 and a draft of more than 9 m, became the second ship of the Orlan project. The cruiser’s forecastle is about 70% of the ship’s length. It is divided by watertight bulkheads into sixteen compartments. There are 5 decks throughout the hull. In the stern under the deck there is a hangar for three helicopters and a lift for feeding them upstairs, storage rooms for fuel and ammunition. The main material of the add-ons is aluminum-magnesium alloys.
There is no general reservation on the cruiser, but the bottom is double for protection against combat damage, and at the level of the waterline a thickened skin belt stretches along the perimeter, its height is 1 m below the waterline and 2.5 m above it.
Armored protection
Armored protection is made in the engine and reactor compartments, rocket cellars, helicopter hangar, ammunition cellars, fuel storage. Artillery installations, the main command post of the ship and the combat information post are protected.
"Admiral Lazarev" is an atomic cruiser, the characteristics of which allow unlimited time to be in autonomous navigation in a nuclear reactor. And in boilers at the declared speed, it can be in the sea for 1000 days.
Its maximum displacement is 26.2 thousand tons. Seventeen knots can reach speeds on auxiliary boilers, and 31 knots on the main unit, or 57 km / h in land measurements.
Power point
"Admiral Lazarev" is an atomic cruiser whose engines run on nuclear fuel.
Two-shaft power plant with five-blade propellers. It consists of two water-cooled thermal neutron water reactors with a power of 600 mW and two steam turbines with a total capacity of 140 thousand liters. from.
Each of the two autonomous sections of the steam generating unit includes a reactor with service systems and devices. PPU is in a reactor compartment. On both sides of it along the bow and stern of the ship is a steam turbine installation of two autonomous parts, and each of them works on its own line.
The cruiser also has a backup option for providing steam turbines. Automated fired steam boilers produce 115 tons of steam each hour.
Steam and condensate are supplied on any side through an extensive network of pipelines.
Four turbogenerators, each of which has a capacity of 3000 kW, and four gas turbogenerators of 1500 kW each, provide the ship with electricity. They are located in four compartments.
Such a power plant allows you to provide electricity and heat to a small city of thousands per 150 population.
Missile weapons
TARK “Admiral Lazarev” is an atomic cruiser, the armament of which is missile, anti-aircraft, artillery, and torpedo-mine is supplemented by aviation.
The main striking force of the ship is twenty “Granit” anti-ship missile systems (ASM) - supersonic cruise missiles with a launch mass of 7 tons, flying low at the target, with a flight range of over 600 km. They are located in launchers below the deck in the bow. The elevation angle is 47 °.
The missiles in flight are autonomous, one of them in a salvo flies higher than the others and controls them, distributes targets, before the target they all perform anti-aircraft complex maneuvers.
For close defense, the cruiser was installed on both sides of the bow superstructure of the Osa-MA air defense system with retractable double-beam launchers for 40 missiles.
The main means of air defense of the far zone on the cruiser are two S-300F Fort anti-aircraft missile systems, each with six vertical launch launchers.
One launcher is designed to launch eight missiles, that is, the whole ship can launch 96 missiles at a time. The targets, the flight speed of which reaches 1.3 km / s, "Fort" is able to hit at a distance of 75 km, at an altitude of 25 to 25 thousand meters.
Artillery and anti-aircraft weapons
The nuclear-powered missile cruiser Admiral Lazarev was equipped as an artillery weapon with a two-gun AK-130 130-mm turret located aft with the M-184 firing control system, which can simultaneously support two targets. Horizontally, the guns can be rotated 180 °, vertically fall to minus 10 ° and rise to 85 °.
This versatile system can fire air, coastal and sea targets at speeds up to 86 rounds per minute at a distance of up to 25 km.
"Admiral Lazarev" - an atomic cruiser, short-range anti-aircraft artillery on which was represented by four batteries of two six-barrel 30-mm AK-630M assault rifles and a total ammunition of 48 thousand shells.
Anti-submarine weapons
The heavy nuclear missile cruiser Admiral Lazarev as anti-submarine weaponry was equipped with the Vodopad missile system, the 83RN or 84RN model rocket torpedoes launched from torpedo tubes on board the ship. The rocket dived into the water, the engine started at a depth, it flew out and reached the target at a distance of 60 km through the air. Only there a warhead was detached - a 400-mm UMGT-1 homing torpedo or a nuclear depth bomb. Ammunition was up to thirty missile torpedoes.
In the bow was installed a twelve-barrel 213-mm rocket launcher RBU-6000 "Smerch-2", and aft - two 303-mm bombers 6 RBU-1000 "Smerch-3".
Squadron
"Admiral Lazarev" is an atomic cruiser, on board of which an aviation detachment of three heavy helicopters of anti-submarine modification or target designation was based, depending on the tasks assigned. They could carry out the tasks of search and rescue, reconnaissance and target designation, anti-submarine search. In addition to the hangar under the deck, the elevator and the ammunition storage, the cruiser was equipped with a take-off and landing aft and an aviation control post with the necessary navigation equipment. Separate cabins were provided for the crews.
The cruisers of this project were the first to receive such a reserve of displacement so that it was possible to shelter both cars and the fuel supply to them under the deck.
Radar weapons and communications
"Admiral Lazarev" - an atomic cruiser with the latest electronic weapons. It included surveillance radars MR-600 Voskhod and MR-710M Fregat-M, combined into the Flag radar complex, two Vaigach navigation stations, two low-flying target detection stations Podkat, and the Drive-V system »For radio navigation of helicopters.
Radio intelligence and electronic warfare were carried out by the Cantata-M complex. The countermeasures also included two twin launchers of the shot jamming complex with an ammunition of 400 rounds, a towed false torpedo target with a powerful sound generator.
The Typhoon-2 radio communications complex consisted of communication systems in different wave ranges, including Tsunami-BM satellite communications.
Management was carried out using the combat information management system (BIUS) "Lumberjack 44".
Ship crew
The nuclear-powered missile cruiser Admiral Lazarev, pr. 1144/11442, was served by a crew of more than seven hundred people, including from 100 to 120 officers.
For officers and midshipmen, single and double cabins were intended, for sailors and foremen - cockpits designed for 6-30 people. The team members had at their disposal two baths, a sauna, a 6 × 2.5 m pool, fifteen showers, a medical unit with an X-ray room, an outpatient clinic, an operating room, an infirmary and a pharmacy.
To relax on the cruiser there are three cabins, a salon, a gym.
And on board housed its own television studio, three elevators and forty-nine corridors with a length of almost twenty kilometers.
Cruiser Past
The Admiral Lazarev, an atomic cruiser that was named Frunze until 1992, changed several side numbers from 1984 to 1996: 190, 050, 028, 014, 058, 010, 015.
The cruiser was launched in the spring of 1981, entered service in the fall of 1984, and in the fall of 1985 made a transition from the Baltic to the duty station in Vladivostok.
On the way, TARK called at the ports of Luanda in Angola, Aden in South Yemen and several ports in Vietnam.
The collapse of the Soviet Union led to serious problems, including in the Navy. While the last ship of the series was being completed with great effort, the first two came into almost complete disrepair. In the 90s of the last century, the Admiral Lazarev was withdrawn from the combat fleet for long-term conservation and became a joke in Abrek Bay. At the end of the century, it was prepared for disposal, then a small part of the means for repair was found at one of the regional repair enterprises.
At the end of 2002, a fire broke out on a ship in one of the cubicles. They fought with fire for four hours, but extinguished it safely. Two years later, nuclear power plants were removed from the cruiser.
So back in 2011, the “Admiral Lazarev”, the nuclear cruiser (photo below), looked like.
The future of the cruiser
While the ship is on a joke, guessing about his future fate is useless. The decision on modernization has been made, but whether it will be carried out, and to what extent, time will tell.
Admiral Lazarev, an atomic cruiser whose modernization will be carried out under the reduced technical project for the restoration of the Admiral Nakhimov TARK, has now undergone repairs in the dock to restore buoyancy at the 30th Pacific Fleet shipyard and is awaiting further changes in its fate.
Although today there is only one of the four highly autonomous TARKs in the ranks, they remain the largest and most powerful in the world in their class. The first and only surface nuclear ships of the Soviet and later Russian navy, which have no analogues in the world.