Shipbucket

Thanks everyone for the kind words! Glad to see there is an interest in these designs, and since I'm also learning a lot from these discussions, I'm particularly happy when I can bring something to the table as well. It has, but are you sure that the IFF interrogation should be left entirely in the hands of the high-power, low-ROT physically scanning radar? If the Podberyozovik is out of order for any reason, doesn't this mean that the whole IFF interrogation capability goes down the drain? That's a good point, even though the radar blind zone is no wider than the radar mast and mainmast. Rather than the sides of the hangar though (lots of functional clutter, too low on the horizon), I will give a shot at putting the two aft plates below or around the Podberyozovik. I wanted to do a later semi-stealth variant anyway, where the radar mast would have been merged into the rear stack, where there might be place for two plates. I'll give it a shot.
Side note: Is there any potential downside in array calibration/handover or power/signal distribution in having phased-array plates in completely different locations on the ship? I feel this might impact sensor integration and/or the space allocated to power feeds. Even if the radar and data management systems are top-notch, the hull isn't. Passive arrays? In terms of power and pure scanning ability, I'm 100% with you. The MiG-31 was, after all, the first fighter with a PESA radar, and I assume this helped it tremendously in the protection of large areas against targets in all altitudes. Very high-capability land-based mobile PESAs were also entering service in the same timeframe, and I'm not clear on what the scan method on the Podberyozovik and latter-day Fregats was, but they might qualify.
However, I'm more concerned about multi-tasking the arrays to ensure scanning, tracking and target designation/missile targeting at the same time. Doesn't that by definition require an active array with enough computer power to steer the transmit elements individually?
If I'm not mistaken (and I might very well be, since I'm completely out of my league on radar specifics), this would not be possible with first-generation PESA arrays where the phase-scanning can't be adapted on the fly.
All notion of quality of Soviet scanned arrays aside, that would require a significant additional development time on top of having an operational scan-and-track array on ships. Bear in mind the dismal state of the Soviet microelectronics industry, although steps were being taken to change course in the late 80s.
Consider as an example that the Mars/Passat array on the late Soviet/Russian carriers(Baku/Gorshkov and Kuznetsov) was rapidly ditched after being built into two ships, AFAIK in part due to the overambitious requirement for a single system handling air search, track, targeting and ATC...

All in all, I think that the very second phased-array radar type to enter naval service would not yet have the kind of capability to do away with the missile directors.
Even though the performance of the radar itself might overshadow that of, say, a SPY-1B. Not much IMO, considering that the phased-array housing replaces a solid pyramid mast with a radar on top. We'll see how the experiment with the rear arrays goes forward and helps in this regard, but otherwise there is still one bridge worth of superstructure where I could move the phased-array assembly down. At the cost of low-altitude FOV, of course. Thanks, but that's made that much easier as long as I'm just scabbing stuff on an IRL design. Let's talk about that again when I start posting original designs...

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Well, I believe these vessels had some topweight issues, as original designed. Thats what I have heard them saying over in Kaliningrad.

Thanks, good to know. Now the question is how much stability reserve the 12m hull plug from the new propulsion unit will afford, and how much the phased array (and Podberyozovik on its mast) will weigh.

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It just seems to me that a lot of the weapons systems and radars are quite high in the ship, including the VLS on the quarterdeck, heavier CIWS plus you've got the enlarged area where the SSMs were on the original Pr.956. I know the lengthened hull might help but it just seems a bit loaded to me.

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I agree that it looks somewhat overloaded, but I'm not sure if it actually is. Note that we've removed a 100MT gun aft and probably another 50MT of belowdecks equipment; by comparison, a loaded strike-length 61-cell Mk 41 is in the 200MT neighborhood. The gun forward is also quite a bit lighter. The phased arrays are not going to be lightweight, but neither is the S-band FRESCAN they replaced.

I think I'd remove the midships box launchers, though. I think a Klub variant can handle basically any surface-to-surface role at this point.

Couple of new versions pertaining to the ongoing discussion:

1) About the rearwards gap in radar coverage: I have tried and failed to fit the two rearward phased-array plates between the radar mast and the rear stack, to no avail. The vertical space between the stack shield and the Podberyozovik is not sufficient to fit the plates without the stack blocking even more FOV. Since the sides of the hangar have their own problems, I have cooked up a half-way solution with the rear plates ported to the top of the hangar, merging with the mainmast.
This brings its own problems, not least the impact of the exhaust gasses on the cooling of the arrays. Since I have extended upwards the bays on the sides of the hangar, there may be some space in the middle of the housing.



2) In an attempt to reduce top-weight, I have tried to:
- Shorten the Podberyozovik mast by about 2m
- Move the (grouped) phased-array radar down one deck
- Remove completely the top deck above the bridge

The latter implies that any electronics and workspace housed there would be moved to the "cheeks" built up in place of the Moskit launchers. System miniaturization might help as well, to the extent that the ship's legacy layout is still flexible enough for adaptation to new systems.


The midships launchers are for RPK-9 ASW missiles. They are indeed technically redundant with the Kalibr (91RT2) carried in the UKSK blocks on the quarterdeck, and may be a conceptual holdover of the Oniks-only versions.
All things considered, and if space is available, they make more sense as ASW self-defense system that would leave more UKSK cells to mission-critical Oniks or 3M54 ASuW missiles. Dedicating UKSK cells to longer-ranged 91RT2 torpedo carriers make more sense on an ASW-oriented ship with a better sonar array.
Regarding weight and balance, are these launchers that critical, seeing how they are just above the main deck, close to center of mass, and this version is meant to be retractable (think Mk.44 ABL)? A compromise could therefore move the side-firing launchers one deck lower to fire forward (somewhere above the torpedo tubes.

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Would something like this arrangement be possible? It moves the aft phased arrays down one deck and outboard, flanking the hangar, with the illuminators sponsoned further abeam. Forward, rearrangement moves the heavy phased arrays down, and the presumably lighter dome aloft.



For IFF, I think I'd try for something much lighter like the USN's OE-120 that you see on Burkes and Ticos, perhaps underneath the dome on my arrangement.

Mrrgh... That's probably a better fit in terms of forward visibility, but it's starting to look completely different. I must admit I hadn't explored this kind of arrangement yet, but it's not as shocking as it looks at first glance.Come to think of it, it starts looking like the Mars-Passat array on the Kuznetsov. Aaand off I go back from square one on a new tangent! If you care to follow me down the rabbit hole for a while:
- The only concrete reason to have these sleek rectangle phased-array plates is imitation of the existing Poliment system
- Most 90s concepts feature much shorter, nearly square plates.
- I had so far figured that a helpful, realistic (mid-90s Soviet) array with sufficient resolution would be bigger, might be wrong though
- On the one hand, we have a massive L-band rotating array for long-range detection, so why not dedicate smaller X-band plates purely to mid-range target acquisition and tracking?
- On the other, what's the downside of wider plates (like the current ones rotated 90°) in terms of vertical phase-scanning? As long as there are separate illuminators, the altitude resolution might be enough.
- For wider plates, what's speaking against rebuilding the deckhouse above the bridge with three plates, and leave a single plate facing directly aft just above the hangar?
- In this context, what is the Band Stand dome even for anymore? In the original Sovremenniy, it does scan-and-track of surface targets for the Moskit, while the smaller bubbles on the sides of the stack are the missile downlink antennas.
- There's no Moskits anymore, and though all that stuff can probably work with the Oniks, is it really necessary?
Well, I'll give a shot at reworking all this with flatter radar arrays, and try to figure out what to do with the masts.
So that's what this array is... I had been wondering what that crow's nest was on the Arleigh Burkes, figured it had to do with SIGINT or something. Thanks for the input. I like the concept, all the more so since I recently discovered what looks like a Russian surface-search equivalent and I'm dedicated to using it. When I get around to posting original designs in this vein, be ready for donut-shaped multi-band AESAs on smaller ships, or on carriers and such, if it can double as TACAN/ATC.
But that's too early for this ship. Bear in mind that we're talking about a late-90s Soviet technology level, my bad if that wasn't clear before. So, technically feasible, probably not budgetable for series production.
Also in the present case, I'm not sure where it fits. In terms of Soviet ship design, it would fit best around the base of a rotating array (even a modern PA set), in this case atop the Poberyozovik mast, where it would be nearly redundant. In the present configuration, the Podberyozovik (nominally) includes an interrogator, and we've kept the PAR modules as well, but part or all of the odd Yagi antennas lying around might very well be legacy IFF interrogators as well for all I know. I must confess I'm pretty ignorant on Soviet IFF systems, with a few exceptions. Barring further information, I would stick to interrogators directly linked to radars for the kind of interim configuration we're going with here.

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To be honest, in order to leverage technology as it existed at the time, I'd think about abandoning the AEGIS-feeling framework entirely. I might instead try to fit, say, six to eight X-band PESAs from MiG-31 technology, on trainable mounts. As many as I can, anyway.

It might start looking like Sea Phoenix! This was an exploratory effort in the 1970s to leverage the F-14's AWG-9 combat system to provide a rudimentary time-shared (that is, not 1:1 director-limited) guidance system on a Perry-scale hull. This was actually tested at sea with the fourteenth AWG-9 unit on USNS Wheeling, and results were pretty good. The plans I've seen (and hell, drawn) envision two units forward, one aft, with the higher of the forward mounts engaged in high-resolution sector scanning, queued from the SPS-49.

The whole ship drawing appears to be lost to history, but this is the notional radar configuration from that study.



Anyway, I'd try to work around something like that instead. Now Sea Phoenix was lucky in that it really only needed midcourse guidance, and SA-N-12 can't offer that terminal homing capability. Still, I think this is the direction I'd take the drawing. Practically speaking, VLS implies midcourse guidance and an autopilot (obviously it can't be pure SARH off the rail), and so you ought to be able to provide endstage illumination for one missile per radar while you have at least another set launching and heading out on inertial guidance.

A fighter radar necessarily can't be more than a few tons, which lets us sort of try to bound our stability problems. I consider Carlo Kopp to be a very good data collector (if a less-than-reliable policy viewpoint...), and he's got some nice information on 1990s Russian fighter PESAs. Replace all four illuminators with something like a 1m PESA that could act as a rapid-steered illuminator (and possibly even invoke a notion of ICWI within a reasonably narrow cone), maybe add one more at the forward masthead, and you might be in serious business.

(I note, FYI, that the OE-120 was in USN service in the early 1980s. 2D round phased arrays are apparently drop-dead simple.)


EDIT: Best of all, if you have one of your radar units crap out on you, as Soviet electronics tech was wont to do, you can cover the blind arc with a different PESA tracker/illuminator. And if you have to put to sea with some radar units missing entirely, as again their ships often did, the combat system is degraded rather than dysfunctional.

EDIT2: Doctrinally, this is also a good fit for the Soviet/Russian use case. Ticos had to worry about SSGNs and Backfires and whatnot enveloping the carrier group from all directions. Kirovs and Slavas, the pinnacle of their era, were apparently relatively content with sector defense, with the reasonable expectation that all severe attacks would come from a carrier on a single vector. So I think this really meshes well with the fit and feeling of procurement officers who would have come up treating SA-N-6 as gospel.

Well, yes and no. The Kirov/Slava paradigm might be limited by 1) a typically 80s environment with a low density of targets, particularly AShMs, 2) an operational concept implying, as you said, a mostly uni-directional threat, and 3) fairly bulky AA systems (chiefly the Top Dome and Tomb Stone missile direction radars of the S-300). You can see the limits of that concept in the fact that both classes had omni-directional close-range air defenses (which kinda negates the uni-directional threat argument), and in the numerous Russian voices expressing disappointment in the Slava class for its lack of long-range SAM coverage on more than one azimuth. The weakness was known for a long time, but was considered a trade-off for a lighter and cheaper ship.
In any case, the Sovremenniy doesn't have that problem, seeing how it bristles with illuminators in the first place. With 2 missiles rails, a reload time of 12s on each and a range of 25km on the initial version (about 30s flight time), they still saw it necessary to fit 6 Front Dome missile illuminators (plus 4 optical backup). Redundant sector coverage is ensured, so in your analysis, it makes sense to replace the Front Domes with slewable scanning arrays one-for-one.
The type of slewable targeting array is mostly what I had in mind for the later SAM generation replacing the Uragan (SA-N-7). Considering the Soviet (justified) obsession with backwards compatibility, the phased-array directors for that new missile should be able to handle legacy Uragans, so that they can be retrofitted on Sovremenniy hulls in MLU and the new ships can sail out with previous-generation missiles until enough of the new ones come down the pike.
Come to think of it, this kind of slewable targeting array would pretty much be an enlarged version of the 5P10 Puma (the oddly proportioned box above the bridge, which you also see doing gun FC on the Talwar and Steregushchiy classes), which, I was surprised to learn, is a 64x64 AESA. This IRL version probably requires even more smarts to handle multiple gun- and rocket-type weapon than our one-trick pony of an illuminator. Come to really think of it, who says this Zaslon-based array of yours can't fit inside the Front Dome cover, thereby rendering the new iluminator visually identical to the original, and making the entire point irrelevant to Shipbucket?

Now, as much as I like the idea above, I think it's more appropriate as an upgrade for legacy Sovremenniy hulls, possibly alongside a new SAM system.
I don't know if I mentioned it already, but the PAR-equipped Pr.956.2 I've been doing above is as much a block upgrade as an evaluation/development platform for the new PESA fixed array that will enter service on the second batch of Pr.1244 frigates and the future 10000ton destroyer.
Besides, though I don't have sources confirming it, the abundance of redundant mechanical scan arrays even on 90s projects leads me to consider that the goal of the initial phased arrays was thought less in terms of target designation than raised scan rate. I mean, why else do you put twice the same 3D radar on the same ship? And don't talk about reliability when that same radar is built into all manner of ships for 20 years, at a rate of one per ship. At that stage, if you don't have a half-way civilized MTBF, just scrap the damn thing and start over.
So, yeah, the target (ca. 2015) configuration for such a ship would probably be a fairly smart fixed-plate AESA, if weight allows in more than 1 frequency band, backed up by an assortment of dumber PESA slewable arrays for sector scan and illumination. A fall-back solution is to switch to a dumb PESA scanning array and smarter AESA "heads", which is the current IRL version. Not to be overly contarian, but I'm wondering if this isn't a case of the bottleneck being data treatment (computers) rather than antenna (radar) as such. Again, Ive seen similar things in the Russian industry nowadays, so why not. I'll have to figure out how to introduce this properly, or turn it into its own thing.

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