A sea battle with the participation of the strongest. Steel and fire. A splash of molten metal in a swirling maelstrom of sinking debris. The names of the ships go into immortality, and the place of death remains in the xx ° xx’xx’’format of the specified latitude-longitude. This is a tragedy! This is the scale!
The recent discussion of the fight between Kirov and the American Iowa could not go unnoticed. Moreover, the name of the author sounded in the comments. And that means it's time to answer before the venerable public …
In my purely personal opinion, the American columnist for the National Interest, as well as his Russian opponent with VO, made a lot of mistakes, not paying attention to the most interesting details. As a result, the simulation of the fight between “Kirov” and “Iowa” presented in both articles has turned into a fierce pseudoscientific fantasy.
In the past, I managed to write a series of articles on the comparison of battleship and TARKR, but none of the episodes touched on the battle of these giants in the form of a knightly duel. It all came down to the analysis of design solutions and the search for the “missing” load. Why, with the same dimensions (250..270 m in length), the displacement of "Kirov" and "Iowa" radically differed by two and a half times. It is worth noting that the battleship's hull had a "bottle-shaped" shape with a sharp narrowing at the ends, and the width of the TARKR remained unchanged (28 m) over the greater length of its hull.
The answer turned out to be simple, as was the question - from the point of view of designers of past eras, the hull of a heavy missile cruiser corresponds in size to the largest battleships of the later period. At the same time, most of the Kirov's hull is located ABOVE the water, due to the "lightness" of modern weapons, the low power of the nuclear power plant and the lack of full-fledged protection (for comparison, the "Iowa" carried 20 thousand tons of armor, this, by the way, 300 w / d wagons with metal). As a result, with a freeboard height of 5 m, it “sank” into the water by as much as 11 meters.
Like an iceberg, most of the battleship was hiding under water.
The freeboard of the atomic “Kirov”, on the contrary, is much higher in height than its underwater part (11 … 16 against only 8 meters of draft).
I think there will be no more questions with this. The ships designed in different eras were as different as heaven and earth. Another question - What advantages would a ship, created according to the standards of the first half of the twentieth century, have, which received modern missile weapons in the course of modernization?
A knightly duel between “Kirov” (20 “granites”) and “Iowa” (32 “tomahawks” + 16 “harpoons”) from a distance of a couple of hundred miles would have ended in the destruction of both. As of the end of the 80s, none of the opponents had the opportunity to reliably repel a massive attack of low-flying CDs.
Here it is worth refraining from the loud epithets “torn in half”, especially in relation to the strongest “Iowa” (skin thickness - up to 37 mm). I'm not even talking about the strength of the power set, which was designed for the installation of 20 thousand tons of armor plates. No surface explosions are capable of sinking such a ship. In history, there are cases of detonation of dozens of oxygen torpedoes with a 600 kg warhead ("Mikuma") or six tons of rocket powder and explosives (BOD "Otvazhny"), after which the ships remained afloat for many hours. At the same time, neither the Japanese cruiser nor the Soviet patrol (BOD rank 2) were close in size to the TARKR or battleship.
But in general, the line of reasoning was set correctly: after 10+ hits by cruise missiles (Granite and Tomahawk-109B), both opponents will lose value as combat units.
But this is not a reason for any conclusions and the setting of an equal sign between the highly protected battleship and the structures of the nuclear missile era.
If the ship allows to shoot itself with dozens of anti-ship missiles with impunity, then no armor will help it.
The last rocket
But what if …
What if the cruiser's anti-aircraft weapons can shoot down 16 harpoons and 31 tomahawks, and the battleship intercepts 19 of the 20 Granites fired at it? There will be only one missile that will reach the target.
The composition of the Kirov air defense system is known. The “American” has everything much sadder, the four “Falanxes” have a weak argument. But don't forget about electronic warfare. During the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, none of the 54 anti-ship missiles fired by the Egyptians reached their target. Means of electronic warfare are one of the most effective areas in the creation of protection against high-precision weapons.
And now, there is only one rocket left. For “Kirov” even a single hit from “Tomahawk” is deadly, while for a battleship a single “Granite” is an unpleasant, but quite tolerable damage. Ships of this class were originally designed to withstand blows.
The tale of the "seven-ton colossus" flying at 2, 5 speeds of sound got orders of magnitude. In dense layers of the atmosphere, when approaching the target, the speed of any "Granite" for obvious reasons becomes much less than 2M.
Of the 7 tons of launch mass, after the separation of the 2-ton launch booster and the development of fuel, hardly 4 tons will remain - the aircraft and its 700 kg warhead. We can see what happens to an aircraft in a collision even with a relatively “soft” obstacle in the form of the earth from the chronicles of numerous air crashes. Aircraft structures are crumbling like a house of cards, even their strongest elements - refractory turbine blades scatter and lie on the surface.
There is no need to start now about the “denser layout of the cruise missile”. Everything related to aviation is built with a minimum safety factor, otherwise it will not take off.
For the most doubting - the wreckage of the Tomahawk intercepted over Syria. No one has drilled mines trying to find fragments of American missiles in the bowels of the earth. They were all lying on the surface, torn to shreds by hitting the ground.
You will say - it was a blow on a tangent. Have you ever wondered - what are the chances that in a naval battle a cruise missile will hit the side along the normal ???
This I mean that in matters of overcoming the obstacle (in this case - armor), the mass of the aircraft is in last place. Plastic fairing, antennas, short fenders, engine fuel fittings, aluminum casing and electronics blocks will all be flattened out in a split second.
Only the warhead will try to pierce the armor. A thin-walled egg-shaped object with a filling factor of ≈70%, flying at one and a half speeds of sound. A pitiful resemblance of a 356 mm armor-piercing projectile of the 1911 model. Only that one had a filling factor of 2.5%, the remaining 97.5% fell on an array of hardened metal.
The 747 kg projectile contained only 20 kg of explosives - 25 times less than the Granit warhead!
You do not think that the designers of the Obukhov plant were stupid and did not understand the obvious things (more explosive content - more damage)? The creators of the ammunition knew that the BB projectile should not have any significant cavities, slots, and other elements that weaken its design. Otherwise, he will not complete his task.
For these reasons, "Granit" (like any of the existing anti-ship missiles) cannot be considered an analogue of an AP shell. Its closest analogue is a large-caliber high-explosive bomb.
In practice, in the vast majority of cases, the mines could not cause serious damage to a battleship-class ship.
If you try to simulate the hit of "Granite" in "Iowa", taking into account all the known (and little-known) details, you get the following:
With a high degree of probability, the missile will break through the side skin (37 mm "mild" structural steel) and explode without even reaching the armor belt. I think that most of those present know that the “Iowa” had an inner belt, which was located behind the outer skin of the side. The main reasons are the simplification of the design (roughly hewn plates did not need to repeat the smooth contours of the hull) and the desire to increase the resistance against AP shells, due to the greater angle of inclination of the plates.
In modern conditions, this solution is ineffective. The explosion of the anti-ship missile warhead will “turn” the outer skin over an area of several tens of square meters. m; the frames will be deformed and several armor plates will be torn off. Shocks will briefly damage a piece of equipment. That's all.
When hitting the deck or superstructure, antennas and openly standing weapons can be demolished, without a threat to the survivability of the ship itself.
Outside the 140-meter citadel, there are no vital mechanisms (this is the whole essence of the citadel). A single bomb hit is not capable of causing any serious flooding.
Studying the design of the Iowa and the combat damage of ships of similar class, I do not find a single reason why a battleship could die from being hit by one or two anti-ship missiles similar to the P-700 Granit.
And this is its main difference from modern "cans", for which even fragments of downed missiles are dangerous.
Combat Fantasy
The plot field of the confrontation between “Kirov” and “Iowa” is much wider than the boring exchange of “Granites” and “Tomahawks”.
If this happens at a line-of-sight range (≈30 km), from the position of combat tracking, the main battery artillery will be used and, in response, S-300 anti-aircraft missiles aimed at a sea target. The only problem is the very senselessness of the situation, from which it is unlikely that it will be possible to extract any benefit for further conversation.
In modern conditions, naval artillery is of interest only as a supplement to missile weapons, when firing at ground targets. As for the firing modes of the air defense missile system, the anti-aircraft missiles available on the Kirov are ineffective against large surface targets, due to the lack of a contact fuse. Warheads will be detonated at a distance, covering the battleship deck with a hail of small fragments.
You can try to destroy a battleship special warhead or simulate a battle, with the participation of its numerous guards, tk. reactivated “Iowas” have always operated as part of “battle ship battle groups”, which, in addition to the flagship (LC), included a nuclear cruiser and escort ships of various classes.
In general, such alternatives do not arouse the slightest interest. We just tried to extract the maximum useful conclusions from this dispute. The main ones are underestimation of constructive protection and overestimation of the capabilities of modern missile weapons.
