"This Giant Russian Ship Is Toting Two Submarines" Topic

"America's isn't the only military to rely on heavy-lift transport vessels, the unusual class of utility ship that helped ferry the crippled USS Cole home for repairs. Russia has just released a series of photos documenting the slow return trip to the Zvezdochka shipyard for a pair of its Akula II-class submarines, the Bratsk and the Samara.

The question is, why are we seeing them at all?

Submarines are an essential component to Russia's naval capabilities. As Nikolay Cherkashin of stoletie.ru explains. Subs provide Russia with an invaluable means of sneaking relatively unhindered through these obstacles without having to launch from the far North and so it's little wonder why they've been so notoriously secretive about the submarine fleet since the end of World War II…"

Full article here
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Amicalement
Armand

They look pretty worn out or is that the way all subs look out of the water?

They look pretty worn out or is that the way all subs look out of the water?

I was thinking the same thing!

During the 1990s Russia let a lot of their ships sit and rust. Now they are dusting them off and polishing them up so the world will see that they are back in business!

Not really… looks like normal discoloration for a sub that has been sitting at pier. The portion that is actually under water would be subject to the effects of salt and marine life which would discolor the paint. Once they get these over to a drydock and polish them up a bit, they will be just as sexy as when they were brand new!!!

Just a bit biased… 20 years as a Submariner!!!

I'll make a few guesses…

The subs should not look like that. That's disuse. Anything sitting in seawater is going to collect organisms, and these then die and leave a protein crust, etc. This doesn't matter on the bottom of a typical ship, but subs should be kept clean because a smooth surface is quieter through the water, and they have important openings that you want to work reliably – torpedo tubes, missile tubes, countermeasure dispensers, towed-array hangars, and goodness knows what else.

The subs are being carried instead of sailed for the same reason they're dirty – the Russian military is in a bad way. They've been conducting far fewer training flights and naval patrols and what have you. They've been having big trouble with India, who buys their equipment and has been very dissatisfied over the last fifteen years. They can't be sailed, so they're hauling them somewhere to fix them up.

It's more than saber-rattling, they are gobbling up new territories. But they're a paper tiger at the moment. They're scaring everyone, which lets them take territory without battle – we've seen that before. Soon, however, they'll get their military back together and then the real fun begins.

That's typical for how a sub looks out of the water.

What isn't typical is using a heavy-lift ship to transport subs. That implies that those two boats are in really -poor material condition, maybe not even a functional reactor on board.

Lion in the Stars – Good point. I have never seen a nuclear powered vessel transported in this manner. It is hard to tell if there was any hull cuts to remove the reactor or not. I would guess they probably do have a reactor on board, but it may not have been operated in a long time.

You know what my favorite thing to do would be? Getting to restart the reactor on a Russian sub that hasn't had maintenance or monitoring in a decade. I can't think of any way that could go wrong.