Posted on 12/22/2021 2:33:08 AM PST by blueplum
THIS is the dramatic moment Russia's £300m stealth warship that was designed to carry hypersonic missiles went up in flames in a humiliating blow for Vladimir Putin.
New footage shows devastating fire damage to the new £307 million warship intended to carry Putin’s lethal Mach-9 hypersonic missiles....
...The scale of the blaze, which started on Friday in St Petersburg, has been viewed as a massive set back to the Kremlin’s naval modernisation programme.
Huge flames and thick smoke were seen rising from the corvette Provornyy at Severnaya Verf shipyard where it was being built.
The battleship was almost completely destroyed by the fire - the latest of a spate of mysterious blazes at top secret naval shipbuilding facilities ...
(Excerpt) Read more at thesun.co.uk ...
We’ll see.
The LPD-17 and LCS programs spanned several administrations, and both were utter fiascos, with billions spent for ships that don’t work.
The Gerald Ford is years behind schedule and still rife with problems.
Ditto the Zumwalt destroyer program.
I think your optimism is based on wishful thinking of an America that is gone.
No. That America is here, has always been here. It’s a raging machine, just waiting for the right leaders to open the door & put in the coal.
Wow......
When LS and Travis Mcgee debate........ it’s a chance for the rest of us to perk up and pay close attention
Ah, we’re only differing over what the potential of America still is.
I’m always an optimist. I think it’s warranted by history. In 1812, with only six frigates, we captured two British frigates, a host of other ships, and made them tie up a significant portion of their navy just blockading three ports. Reading the Brit press, they were utterly shocked, and at the end of the war were already saying that the Age of America had dawned. Mind you, this is 80 years before the Spanish-American War when the real Age of America dawned.
Despite massive abuse, neglect, and downsizing, the productive potential of the USA remains a massive giant waiting to be awakened.
But the Russians have proven over 40 years that their main advantage was their gigantic population and a willingness to kill them. They no longer have that option. Many, if not most, of their “breakthroughs” in the Cold War later were shown to be illusory, from their achievements in the “Space Race” to their fatally flawed SSTs and Alpha subs. Remember we ACCELERATED those failures by letting them “steal” blueprints & tech from us that we had injected with critical failure points (hence the explosion of the Transsiberian Pipeline.)
Travis is right that in raw numbers right now it appears that this fire was no big deal. But I tend to look at underlying fundamentals. The Russkies’ are all bad.
Finally, finally, it was announced the Navy Rail Gun fiasco has been declared dead
Only if a reliable railgun can be developed.
Larry’s steady reassurance kept hope alive on election night 2016. Well, that and the NYT election meters, which worked so well that NYT had to get rid of them before the 2018 midterms.
Larry’s books keep our family informed and positive! What a great and blessed nation. May God preserve us.
Unfortunately, the Chinese didn’t kill their project and they are currently conducting sea tests of theirs.
I think it’s a matter of when, not if.
The only other viable concept would be for a BB to become a so-called arsenal ship - a semi submersible with a vast number of VLS cells. Unfortunately the problem with making a new traditional BB is the fact that modern ASM render armor practically useless and a BB made along traditional lines is detectable from far farther away than it can see and its guns can range.
In what shipyards, with what skilled shipwrights? Most of those capabilities are gone and will take years or decades to rebuild. We have one, count it, one shipyard that can build or overhaul a carrier, and it’s on the East Coast - not real
useful for a Pacific war. Take that yard out, our fleet carriers no longer can be built or be repaired.
Here’s something else to take into account.
Thickest armor on USS Iowa - 19.5 inches on the turret faces - 17” armor plate over 2.5” of STS steel.
Armor penetration capability of Russian Kornet-D semi-man-portable antitank missile: 51 inches - and that’s after penetrating explosive reactive armor.
Modern antishipping missiles are even larger, thereby having even more armor penetration capability.
The advent of the missile propelled shaped charge spelled the end of the battleship as it renders armor beyond a level sufficient to protect against small arms up to 5” gunfire irrelevant.
The vodka must have caught fire.
Gotta irk the antivax propaganda Russian trolls here.
It was one of those, or something else.
Well, Travis is right to point out that right now we are the Union army of 1861, not Sherman’s veterans of 1864.
And the navy is the one that the Japanese mostly sank in 1941, not the one building that they couldn’t defeat.
I totally understand. Remember in 1941 we had very few such “skilled shipwrights.” Same as in 1800, when we built six pretty good frigates (including a couple that were exceptional).
My point is, when Americans really need to, we have it in our character to step up.
Like Churchill said, “Americans can always be counted on to do the right thing . . . after they’ve exhausted all other alternatives.”
A modern battleship need not be a copy of a WW2 era battleship anymore than a modern fighter is a copy of a WW2 era fighter.
I’m looking at the role these ships can play in a modern fleet, not their entire design.
Back then we had quite a lot more shipyards and a core of shipwrights and designers, especially back in 1812. They only had to be expanded, whereas we don’t have that today.
Character counts, but it only goes so far when you don’t have resources to apply it to.
Even with that - with modern technology, other than as an arsenal ship/massive missile salvo launching platform, the battleship role is not viable. Today a battleship presents a huge investment in resources and manpower that is a single very vulnerable target that does nothing that a squadron of destroyers can’t do - and in times of less conflict, the battleship can only be in once place whereas the destroyers can be in multiple places at once. Without railguns, a battleship can no longer sit within gun range of a peer or near-peer (or someone equipped by same) hostile beachhead without receiving hordes of shipkiller missiles.
Pooty’s boot-lickers here are always telling us it is useless to resist Russia cuz our weapons are useless against mighty Russia!
Wonder how much Russia pays these shills?
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