Soviet battleships between wars. It is well known that of the three remaining Soviet battleships in the ranks, the Marat received the minimum modernization, and the Parizhskaya Kommuna - the largest. Let us consider the changes in the combat potential of the main caliber of ships of this type.
The main caliber. What happened
The main armament of the battleships consisted of 12 * 305-mm guns of the 1907 model, which had a barrel length of 52 caliber and were placed in four three-gun turrets. The maximum elevation angle of these installations was 25 degrees, and the maximum firing range was 470.9 kg. projectile, fired with an initial speed of 762 m / s, was 132 cables. The passport rate of fire was 1.8 rds / min, while loading was carried out in the range of elevation angles from -5 to +15 degrees.
The frontal and side armor plates of the towers were 203 mm thick, the rear side (for the counterweight) was 305 mm, and the roof was 76 mm. The barbets to the upper deck, and slightly below it, were protected by 150 mm of armor, then only 75 mm, although the 1st and 4th towers were reinforced in the bow and stern up to 125 and 200 mm, respectively.
For 305 mm / 52 guns mod. In 1907, experts from pre-revolutionary Russia created 3 types of military ammunition: armor-piercing, semi-armor-piercing and high-explosive. All of them were called shells of the 1911 model, had a mass of 470, 9 kg, an initial speed of 762 m / s, and a firing range at an elevation angle of the guns of 25 degrees. 132 cables. They differed in length - 1,191, 1,530 and 1,491 mm, the explosive content - 12, 96, 61, 5 and 58, 8 kg, respectively. At the same time, an armor-piercing projectile had a KTMB fuse, and a semi-armor-piercing and high-explosive one - MRD mod. 1913 There was also a practical ammunition weighing 470, 9 kg, which was a steel blank, that is, it did not contain either explosives or a fuse.
As for the fire control system, it was extremely confusing on the battleships of the Sevastopol class. The ships had 2 rangefinders with a base of 6 m, located on the bow and stern superstructures, and provided the operation of two central posts, which, among other functions, also contained fire control devices. Battleship towers were not equipped with rangefinders.
But the fire control devices (PUS) themselves were a perfect "hodgepodge", and the point was this. Initially, the Sevastopol-class battleships were supposed to be equipped with the newest PUS, which was developed by Erickson's company. This, by the way, does not mean that the order "floated" abroad, because the development was carried out by the Russian branch of this company and the Russian specialists who worked in it. Alas, they did not meet the deadline, and by the time the Sevastopol was completed, Erickson's fire control system was not yet ready.
As a result, the good old Geisler and K system mod. 1910 Unfortunately, for all its merits, it is still impossible to consider Geisler and K a full-fledged MSA, for a number of serious reasons:
1. PUS "Geisler and K" did not independently generate a correction to the horizontal guidance angle, that is, a lead for firing, and the sight was not included in its composition at all.
2. The CCDs independently calculated the vertical guidance angle, but required the value of the change in distance (VIR) and the value of change in bearing (VIR) as the data required for the calculation. That is, the officers controlling the artillery fire had to independently determine the parameters of the target and their own ship (course, speed, distance, bearing) and calculate the VIR and VIP manually.
However, due to the unavailability of Erickson's FCS, the Navy purchased British Pollen's instruments, which were an automatic machine for calculating VIR and VIP, that is, in fact, they eradicated the main drawback of the Geisler. Pollen's device was successfully integrated with Geisler and K, and later the resulting LMS was supplemented with separate Erickson devices. As a result, by 1917, all four Baltic battleships had a completely modern, by the standards of the First World War, a centralized main caliber fire control system. In terms of its functionality, it, most likely, was somewhat inferior to the British MSA and was approximately on a par with the German ones, but the German ships outnumbered the Sevastopoli in the number of rangefinders.
Modernization of tower installations
Oddly enough, the scope of modernization of guns and turrets of Soviet battleships is not entirely clear, since the sources have significant discrepancies. It is reliably known that the 305-mm / 52 guns of all battleships received lined barrels instead of fastened ones, which greatly simplified the procedure for replacing them. Also more or less clear is the scope of alterations of turret installations on the battleship "Parizhskaya Kommuna".
Most of the work was done with these installations: of all three battleships, only the towers of the Paris Commune received an increased elevation angle of up to 40 degrees, as a result of which the firing range of a standard 470, 9 kg projectile increased by 29 cables, that is, from 132 to 161 cables … The rate of fire also increased: for this, the towers were "transferred" to a fixed loading angle (+6 degrees), which made it possible to significantly increase the power of the vertical guidance, loading and feeding drives. As a result, the rate of fire increased from "passport" 1, 8 to 2, 2 rds / min. The price for this was an increase in the mass of the rotating part of the turret by 4 tons and the abandonment of a backup system for loading guns.
But with the towers of "Marat" and "October Revolution", alas, there is no clarity. A. M. Vasiliev, in his works on the modernization of battleships, points out:
“In 1928-1931, it was possible to modernize the 305-mm MK-3-12 turret only in terms of the rate of fire: at gun elevation angles of -3 degrees. up to +15 degrees it reached 3 shots / min, and at large angles (up to the limiting 25 °) it was 2 shots / min (instead of the previous 1, 8 at all angles)."
But S. I. Titushkin and L. I. Amirkhanov in his work "The main caliber of battleships" does not report any such modernizations of the "Marat" and "October Revolution", but on the contrary, they directly indicate that their rate of fire has remained the same. The author of this article can only assume that S. I. Titushkin and L. I. Amirkhanov, since their work is more specialized in the field of artillery than the works of A. M. Vasilyeva. Perhaps there was a confusion here between what they wanted to do and what they actually did. The fact is that S. I. Titushkin and L. I. Amirkhanov pointed out that such a modernization, with the rate of fire increased to 3 rpm, was planned to be made for the towers of the battleship "Frunze", when there were still plans to rebuild it into a battle cruiser. It must be said that the 2 towers of this battleship were later re-equipped according to the model of the Paris Commune, but this happened after the war, when they were installed on the concrete blocks of battery No. 30 near Sevastopol.
Thus, the firing range of "Marat" and "October Revolution" remained the same for sure - 132 cables, and, most likely, the rate of fire remained the same, that is, at the level of 1, 8 rds / min.
The armor protection of the turrets of all three battleships received the only reinforcement - the thickness of the turret roof was increased from 76 to 152 mm, otherwise the thickness of the armor remained the same.
As for the fire control systems, everything is not quite obvious here either. Let's start with the rangefinders: it is very important that the number of rangefinders supporting the operation of the main fire control system has increased significantly, because all the towers of all three battleships received their own rangefinders. At the same time, S. I. Titushkin and L. I. Amirkhanov claim that the Italian rangefinders OG with a base of 8 m, developed by Galileo, were installed in the Marat towers, while the October Revolution towers also received 8-meter rangefinders, but of a different brand: DM-8 from the company Zeiss. Unfortunately, respected authors do not report anything about the rangefinders installed in the towers of the battleship "Paris Commune", although their presence is clearly visible in the photographs and drawings of the ship.
At the same time A. V. Platonov in his "Encyclopedia of Surface Ships" gives completely different data: that the Zeiss rangefinders were installed on the "Marat" and "October Revolution", and the Italian ones - on the "Paris Commune". But at least the authors agree that all these rangefinders had a base of 8 meters.
However, of course, these rangefinders were of secondary importance, because, firstly, they were at a relatively low altitude above sea level and their horizon was not too great. And secondly, they were used as an additional, clarifying tool to the equipment of the command rangefinder posts (KDP) installed on battleships.
Absolutely all sources agree that on the "October Revolution" and "Paris Commune" two KDP-6 B-22s were installed to service the main caliber, but there is no clarity about what exactly was put on the "Marat". Oddly enough, but S. I. Titushkin and L. I. Amirkhanov claim that this battleship also received 2 KDPs of the same modification, but this is an obvious misprint, because in all photographs of the battleship we see only one such KDP.
At the same time, a number of authors, including A. V. Platonov, report that the "Marat", although it received the KDP-6, but an earlier modification of the B-8. The main differences between the B-8 and the B-22 were the absence of a central aiming sight and telescopic tubes for the gunners of the post. Accordingly, the weight of the KDP-6 B-8 was 2.5 tons, and the calculation was 2 people less than that of the KDP-6 B-22.
But the most "funny" discrepancy in the sources is the number of rangefinders in one KDP-6, no matter what modification. S. I. Titushkin and L. I. Amirkhanov indicate that such a KDP was equipped with two rangefinders with a 6-meter base of the DM-6 brand. But A. V. Platonov indicates the presence of only one such rangefinder. It is difficult to say who is right, because the author of this article is not an expert in fire control systems, and the study of photographs gives practically nothing. Some photos seem to indicate that there are two rangefinders, and not one.
But on the other hand, it follows from the drawings that the second "rangefinder" is not a rangefinder at all, but something shorter.
Still, only one KDP for the main caliber of "Marat" looked clearly not enough, so almost all sources indicate that they were going to put another rangefinder openly on it in an 8-meter base. It is interesting that A. V. Platonov, in one of his monographs, argued that this rangefinder was nevertheless installed on the stern superstructure, but the author has nowhere been able to find a photo of the "Marat" that would confirm this statement. I must say that the device of such dimensions is extremely noticeable, and its absence in the photo obviously indicates that the installation of this rangefinder remained only an intention and was never embodied "in metal". However, in his later works A. V. Platonov no longer wrote about the presence of this rangefinder on the Marat.
As for the fire control devices, everything is much simpler here. As far as the main caliber is concerned, the Marat remained exactly with what it had installed during the First World War, that is, a “prefabricated hodgepodge” of Geisler and K devices, Erickson and Pollen. Thus, the battleship, of course, by the beginning of the Great Patriotic War had a central aiming system for the main caliber guns, but it could not be called modern. Of course, in terms of its qualities, the Marata FCS lagged far behind the equipment that was installed on modern battleships of the world, but it should not be considered completely incompetent. As an example, we can cite the British light cruisers of the "Linder" class, which had an MSA not even at the level of the 1st World War, but worse, because it was deliberately simplified for the sake of economy: nevertheless, these British cruisers participated in many combat episodes and achieved quite acceptable firing accuracy for their 152-mm guns.
Things were somewhat better with the central aiming of the battleships "October Revolution" and "Paris Commune", because they received more advanced AKUR devices. What are these devices?
Since 1925, the so-called APCN direct course apparatus was developed in the USSR, which was planned to be installed as an element of the FCS on all large ships, both newly built (when it comes to that) and undergoing modernization. This device was supposed to independently, in automatic mode, calculate the sight and rear sight, thereby completely freeing the artillery fire manager from working with tables and other manual work and calculations. The work was difficult and progressing slowly, so the leadership of the fleet in 1928 insisted on the parallel acquisition of the British Vickers AKUR device and the synchronous transmission of data from the automatic firearms and commands of the American company Sperry.
However, when the aforementioned sets of instruments came to our disposal, it turned out that they did not meet the expectations of our specialists. So, AKUR had too large an error in determining the heading angle - 16 thousandths of the distance, and the Sperry transmission did not work at all. As a result, the following happened - the specialists of the Electropribor plant, who were developing the APCN, were forced to “retrain” to revise the AKUR and the Sperry synchronous transmission - work on the latter went all the more well since a similar Soviet product was in the final stage of development. Ultimately, the developers, using a number of APCN solutions, were able to achieve the required accuracy parameters from the ACUR, bring the synchronous transmission of the Sperry to a working state and combine with it, and at the output get a fully operational OMS, which significantly surpasses that combination of Geisler, Pollen and Erickson, which was equipped with dreadnoughts of the "Sevastopol" type. It is precisely these AKURs that the "Paris Commune" and the "October Revolution" received.
Undoubtedly, AKUR became a big step forward in comparison with the MSA of the era of the 1st World War, but by the beginning of the Great Patriotic War they were largely outdated. The work on the creation of a fire control system in the USSR continued further: for the leaders of the "Leningrad" type, fire control devices from the "Galileo" company were purchased, which had a number of capabilities that were inaccessible to the AKUR. So, for example, AKUR provided the main caliber firing by observing the signs of falling, or the so-called "fork", when the main artilleryman sought a volley, which fell by flight and, then, undershot, and then began to "half" the distance. But that was all, but the "Molniya" and "Molniya ATs" launchers, developed on the basis of the Italian MSA, could use all three methods of artillery fire control known at that time. The method of observing the signs of falling is described above, and in addition, the new CCDs could use the method of measured deviations, when the KDP rangefinders measured the distance from the target ship to bursts from shell drops, and the method of measured ranges, when the rangefinder determined the distance from the ship leading the fire to its burst. shells, and compared with the calculated data on the position of the target ship.
"Molniya" and "Molniya ATs" were installed on the cruisers of the project 26 and 26-bis, respectively, and, in general, we can say that the fire control system of the main caliber of the cruisers of the "Kirov" and "Maxim Gorky" type was significantly superior in efficiency to the AKUR, installed on domestic battleships, not to mention the Geisler / Pollen / Erickson on the Marat.
As for ammunition for 305-mm guns, in the pre-war USSR, various types of ammunition were developed for 305-mm guns, but only one was adopted.
The first "projectile" direction was the creation of modified armor-piercing and high-explosive shells of an improved form. They had to have the same mass as the arr. 1911, that is, 470, 9 kg, but at the same time, the firing range with them should have increased by 15-17%, and the armor penetration would have improved, and the effect should have become the most replaceable at distances over 75 cables. It is not entirely clear at what stage these works stopped: the fact is that they could fully realize their qualities only in the guns with which it was planned to arm heavy cruisers of the "Kronstadt" type. The latter were supposed to report an initial speed of 470, 9 kg to a projectile of 900 m / s, while a 305 mm / 52 gun mod. 1907, with which battleships of the "Sevastopol" type were armed - only 762 m / sec. As you know, 305-mm artillery with such a record performance before the war was not able to create, respectively, one should not be surprised at the lack of ammunition for them. However, it cannot be ruled out that the creation of new projectiles was stopped due to some other, structural or technological difficulties.
The second type of ammunition, the development of which looked simply extremely promising, was the “semi-armor-piercing projectile mod. 1915 drawing No. 182 ". In fact, this projectile was created not in 1915, but in 1932, and experimented with it until 1937. It was a "super-heavy" 305-mm ammunition, whose mass was 581.4 kg. Of course, such a projectile could only be fired with an initial speed reduced to 690-700 m / s, but due to better energy conservation, the firing range of this ammunition exceeded that of 470.9 kg projectiles by 3%.
However, the most ambitious "bonus" of the increased mass was the extremely high armor penetration. If 470, 9 kg, according to Soviet calculations (hereinafter, the data of S. I. Titushkin and L. I. mm armor plate.
Unfortunately, the "super-heavy" projectile was never adopted: there were problems with the accuracy of fire, in addition, the ammunition turned out to be too long, and the designers failed to ensure its longitudinal strength - it often collapsed when overcoming an armor barrier. In addition, the feeding and loading mechanisms of the Sevastopol-class battleships were not designed to work with such a mass of ammunition.
As a result of all this, work on the "super-heavy" projectile was curtailed, which is a pity. Interestingly, the Americans, having returned to the 305-mm caliber on the "large cruisers" of the "Alaska" type, used such ammunition as the main one. Their guns fired armor-piercing 516, 5 kg shells with an initial speed of 762 m / s, which is at a vertical aiming angle of 45 degrees. provided a firing range of 193 cables and pierced 323 mm armor at a distance of 100 cables.
And, finally, the third direction of improving ammunition for domestic 305-mm / 52 guns was the creation of a “high-explosive long-range projectile mod. 1928 . This ammunition had a mass of only 314 kg, but due to this, its initial speed reached 920 or 950 m / s (unfortunately, somewhere S. I. Titushkin and L. I. values). The increase in firing range turned out to be colossal - if the modernized tower installations of the Paris Commune were able to send 470.9 kg projectiles into flight at a distance of 161 cables, then the lightweight 314-kilogram - by 241 cables, that is, in fact, one and a half times farther. Well, when firing at an elevation angle of 25 degrees, which remained the maximum for the battleships Marat and Oktyabrskaya Revolution, the firing range increased from 132 to 186 cables.
At the same time, the mass of the explosive in the new projectile was almost not inferior to the usual, 470, 9 kg high-explosive ammunition, and amounted to 55, 2 kg versus 58, 8 kg. The only parameter by which lightweight projectiles were inferior to conventional ammunition was dispersion, which was quite large for 314 kg of projectiles. But this drawback was not considered critical, since these shells were intended for firing at coastal areal targets. “High-explosive long-range shells mod. 1928 g. were put into service in 1939, thus becoming the only projectile of this caliber created in the pre-war USSR.
This is where the author finishes the description of the main caliber artillery of the modernized battleships Marat, October Revolution and Paris Commune and goes on to the anti-mine caliber.
