The Soviet Union was the first country in the world to begin serial production of warships with gas turbine main power plants - BOD (now classified as TFR in the Russian Navy, and as destroyers in the Indian Navy) of Project 61, the famous "singing frigates". This event marked a revolution in the creation of naval power plants. The gas turbine main power plant had so many advantages over the steam turbine that it became the standard in the design of warships for many years. As shipborne gas turbines became more and more sophisticated and powerful, they were installed on larger and larger surface ships. At present, gas turbine power plants are installed on ships such as the America-class UDC, the displacement of which exceeds 40 thousand tons, and aircraft carriers of the same displacement, project 71000E Vikrant, of Indian construction.
Unfortunately, they could not keep the championship in the USSR. If the Americans at the end of the sixties came to a single family of unified turbines based on the General Electric LM2500 GTE, then in the USSR they continued to design different turbines for the afterburner and economic progress, and from project to project there could be different GTEs for the same purposes.
Worse, if the Americans on all new ships, except for the largest, installed gas turbine power plants (except for the UDC), then a series of steam turbine destroyers of Project 956 was built in the USSR.
The USSR acted extremely irrationally, as if the leaders responsible for the technical policy of the Navy did not have a clear strategy, or did not have any power. Naturally, this gave rise to unnecessary, unnecessary expenses, which seriously crippled the Soviet economy, which was weak in comparison with the American one. As subsequent years have shown, this approach, unfortunately, turned out to be the norm, not an anomaly.
The pursuit of technically complex systems, which has been the "scourge" of the Navy since the days of D. F. Ustinov, has not become obsolete to this day, and still continues to dominate the minds of the naval chiefs and "commanders" of industry. Alas, in the conditions of a barely growing economy, this approach does not work.
It works quite differently.
Approximately after the beginning of the 80s of the twentieth century, two successive revolutions took place in the western fleets in the creation of the power plant. True, they were not so much technological as engineering. Foreign manufacturers of diesel engines brought their products to such a level of power density, fuel efficiency and reliability that it became possible to create rather large warships with fully diesel power plants.
Initially, it was about several diesel engines, together, through a gearbox operating on a shaft line. In the West, this scheme was called CODAD - Coworking diesel and diesel. With this scheme, one or two diesel engines were used to drive in economic mode, and the second diesel engine (or a pair) was connected when it was necessary to achieve high speeds close to maximum.
I must say that technically there was nothing new in this scheme - diesel ships fought quite successfully during the Second World War. The approach was new - now diesel engines were massively installed on fairly large warships, on those that would have been necessarily equipped with turbines, and at the same time could provide both good speed and an acceptable level of comfort for the crew, while significantly reducing the cost of building and operating ships. Indeed, in the old days, diesel engines were installed either on some small warships and boats, or, as an exception, on German "Deutschlands", but this was an exception to all the rules, and, from the point of view of crew habitability, it was a bad exception.
Combined power plants, consisting of diesel engines for economic running and a gas turbine for high speed (CODAG - Coworking diesel and gas), have also become a mass phenomenon.
The second revolution, which occurred much later, was the emergence of sufficiently powerful and compact integrated electric power plants, in which both diesel generators and turbines generate electricity for propulsion electric motors, and the latter drive the ship. So, on the new destroyer Type 45 of the British Navy, a diesel-electric installation is used as a system that ensures economic progress. Gas turbines with generators are used to reach the high-speed mode of movement, and the maximum power of the two running electric motors is 20 Megawatts each. This is an innovative system, and, apparently, the future belongs to such power plants, since they do not have strict requirements for the placement of engines relative to the shaft lines - diesel generators and turbine generators can be installed in any suitable place.
When, at the beginning of the 2000s, money began to be allocated in Russia for the construction of warships, it seemed that the global trend would continue here. Diesel engines, diesel engines with turbines, then, perhaps, electric propulsion, for which there have been and are quite good developments. The project 20380 corvette received two diesel-diesel units DDA 12000 (CODOD), consisting of two diesel engines of the Kolomna plant of 6000 hp each. each working on a common gearbox.
The frigate of project 22350 received two diesel-gas turbine units from a gas turbine and a diesel engine.
Further events are known - having received the money, the Navy could not master it. At first, there were serious delays in the delivery of the lead frigate 22350, corvettes 20380 were completed in an incredibly long time, with constant adjustments to the project, Serdyukov's "tilt" began in the purchase of imported components, Maidan-2014, sanctions for the Crimea, a drop in oil prices, which, as usual, suddenly opened for all the crisis of motor and gear production at PJSC "Zvezda" in St. Petersburg, etc. Fortunately, the fleet managed to receive from Ukraine three power plants for frigates of Project 11356, which "covered" the Black Sea Fleet …
The new reality, in which the Navy and the shipbuilding industry found itself, pushed the domestic industry to start developing and producing its own gas turbines, and to deploy (unfortunately, so far unsuccessful) the production of gearboxes at the facilities of PJSC "Zvezda". Unfortunately, these were the last sensible decisions in terms of providing ships with power plants.
It would seem that, having spent diesel engines from the Kolomna plant, and a lot of foreign examples of completely successful completely diesel ships, it is possible for a while to "close the issue" with the power plant, in every possible way forcing the production of DDA 12000 units, albeit with reducer delays, and "rebuilding" the architecture of the ships around them. Later, in the future, when domestic turbines and gearboxes for them would be ready for production, they could be used on large and expensive warships, which, in the economic realities of the Russian Federation, cannot be much, but massive patrol boats, corvettes, light to equip frigates with diesel engines. Moreover, large volumes of their purchases would guarantee that the manufacturer - Kolomensky Zavod - not only has a theoretical interest in creating new diesel engines and improving old ones, but also a real opportunity to do this. Everything, however, turned out differently.
Then the dark part of the story begins.
Finding themselves in a situation where gaps in technological chains (interruption of supplies from Ukraine, a ban on the supply of imported MTU diesel engines to Russia for corvettes of project 20385 and MRK of project 21361) coincided with an economic crisis caused by a drop in oil prices, the Navy and the Ministry of Defense as a whole, in matters related to shipbuilding and the provision of GEM ships, they continued to behave as if there were no problems around either with the supply of equipment or with money.
First, it was announced that the construction of a series of ships of Project 22350 was terminated in favor of a more powerful and larger ship, which will only be created in the future according to the project now known as 22350M. On the one hand, this is good - such ships in battle can do much more than even the most high-tech frigates, such as 22350. But on the other hand, while there is not even a project for such a ship, there are only approximate drawings that will definitely not correspond to reality. The idea expressed by representatives of the Navy that the laying of new ships can begin in 2020 is over-optimistic and, apparently, deeply mistaken. And this despite the fact that at the cost of super-efforts, it was possible to establish, albeit a slow, but still somehow working production of gearboxes for these ships!
Secondly, the construction of a series of ships of Project 20380 was stopped and, as a result, the program for the production of marine diesel engines at the Kolomensky Zavod was significantly reduced. The last of the corvettes will be commissioned around 2021. Instead of a more or less worked out corvette of project 20380, work began on the ship (I can't call it a corvette) of project 20386 - an extremely complex technically, very expensive, weakly armed and structurally unsuccessful ship, built on a completely ridiculous concept of combat use (a ship of the near sea zone, allegedly capable of "occasionally" performing tasks in the distance - whatever that means), with a huge number of extremely risky technical solutions, and weapons that are inferior in power to their predecessor, the project 20385 corvette, and very seriously inferior.
Parsing this project has already been carried out, and in more detail, here we will restrict ourselves to questions related to his power plant. On the project 20386, a gas turbine power plant with partial electric propulsion was used. Two gas turbines, working through a gearbox on the propeller shafts, provide high-speed operation, propulsion electric motors and diesel generators - economic progress. Traveling electric motors operate on the same gearbox as the turbines, which determines the "partial" characteristic. Such an installation itself is several times more expensive than the four Kolomna diesel engines and gearboxes used on the corvettes of projects 20380 and 20385, and the life cycle of such a ship is several times more expensive due to the higher fuel consumption of turbines and more expensive repairs of such a power plant. But the Navy was not stopped by these considerations or technical risks (for example, the 6RP model gearbox is still not ready, an optimistic estimate of the date of receiving the first power plant for the ship is 2020. At best).
The Navy was not stopped by the fact that the Kolomensky Zavod, seeing such throwing, at best, will continue to treat the production of engines for the Navy as something deeply secondary, in comparison with the production of engines for railways (at a certain moment, the fleet may find out, that no one wants to meet him halfway in anything, even for promises of money).
Moreover. Deliveries to the fleet of various diesel engines of the D49 family, used both in the power plant of the corvette 20380 and the frigate 22350, would accelerate the creation at the Kolomna plant of a family of diesel engines of a fundamentally new generation - D500. And this would open up completely different prospects for the Navy, because the most powerful 20-cylinder diesel in the family has an estimated power of 10,000 hp. Four of these diesel engines make it possible to assemble a power plant sufficient for a high-speed warship with a displacement of 4,000 tons, while the life cycle of such an installation is much cheaper than that of any conceivable gas turbine.
Is this important in an environment where budget funding will continuously decline? A rhetorical question, isn't it?
Let's make a reservation. The Navy has sweetened Kolomna's pill.
In 2014, the laying of the so-called patrol ships of project 22160 began. And these ships eventually received Kolomna diesel engines. True, the story with them looks strange and smells bad - on the one hand, the ships turned out to be clearly useless and unusable for their intended use. It is quite obvious that every ruble that was spent on them was wasted (and this, according to experts, expressed in private conversations, is about seventy billion rubles in 2014 prices for a series of six ships / However, these data may turn out to be not entirely accurate). On the other hand, each ship has two engines (corvette 20380 has four), which makes the deal less profitable for Kolomna as well. Indeed, the Navy manages to make everyone losers - both itself and the country as a whole, and suppliers. Zelenodolsk won, but he could order something more useful!
For example, instead of one 20386 and six 22160, it would be possible to order five 20380 corvettes for about the same money, moreover, it would be enough for some small modernization. The fleet would receive five more or less useful ships instead of six absolutely useless and one occupied slipway, Kolomna would receive an order for twenty diesel engines, not twelve, the combat capability of the Navy would increase, but …
In general, the “trend” is negative. New warships with diesel engines are not being built or ordered, and we do not have purely turbine projects, and when they will be unknown, with the exception of the disaster ship of project 20386, the main merits of which were pumping out of the budget big money and "killing" the construction program of normal and full-fledged ships of the near sea zone. And which, we note, it is still quite possible that it will not work. The risks of the project are too great.
To contrast with our grim reality, consider how the advent of compact, powerful and reliable diesels has impacted world naval shipbuilding. The format of the article does not provide for the analysis of everything that is being built and planned in the world, so we will limit ourselves to a couple of examples.
At the end of the eighties of the last century, it became clear to the French that tensions in the world would seriously subside in the coming years. Therefore, to update the French Navy, new frigates were ordered, limitedly suitable for full-scale war, but well suited for peacetime tasks in the former French colonies. This is a series of frigates "Lafayette".
On the one hand, the ship received an inconspicuous hull and superstructure, with a record share of solutions made using stealth technology, advanced control electronics and modern electronic and radio-technical weapons. On the other hand, instead of a full-fledged anti-aircraft missile system, space was simply left for it, and the ship's power plant was made in the form of a purely diesel engine. The project turned out to be successful, inexpensive, and the entire Lafayette series built for France is still in service, three more ships were ordered and bought by Saudi Arabia, and Singapore and Taiwan built several analogues for themselves, relying on French technologies and components.
Such ships are quite a solution for situations when a naval presence is needed, and the budget is limited. They have weak weapons, but, as mentioned, it's fairly easy to build up their roster. On the other hand, even if the ships were equipped with full-fledged air defense systems, the Customer would still save a lot on a cheap diesel power plant, and a lower cost of the ship's life cycle. Of course, diesel engines were massively used on warships and other classes that were built in the world in those years, but Lafayette is a frigate with a displacement of 3,600 tons, an ocean-going ship with excellent seaworthiness, autonomy of 50 days and a cruising range of up to 9,000 nautical miles.
The example turned out to be contagious.
China, which since the sixties practiced the construction of diesel warships (not because of a good life, but from the inability to produce a power plant of a different type) of a small displacement, up to 2500 tons, in the late nineties, began to create its "Lafayette" - a ship in comparable dimensions and equipped with the same diesel engines as the French "progenitor", and a wide range of French equipment.
At the beginning of the 2000s, the ship went into series production as "Type 054". Two ships were built. A little later, however, the project was improved - the air defense was strengthened, the electronic weapons were updated, the combat effectiveness was significantly increased, and the French diesel engines were replaced with licensed ones with the same parameters. Today the frigate "type 054A" is the main Chinese ship in the far sea zone. With a displacement of 4000 tons, this ship is a "classmate" of our project 11356, built for the Navy in triplicate. But if we cannot build such ships (after the break with Ukraine, there is nowhere to get a power plant, and work on our own has stopped), then the Chinese continue the series, and today these frigates are in the ranks of the Chinese Navy in the amount of 30 units (2 units 054 and 28 units 054A), three are under construction and there is an order for two ships for Pakistan.
Our shipbuilding programs “don't look good” against this background. Of course, the Project 22350 frigate is capable of destroying ships such as 054A until it runs out of ammunition. But we have only two of them, two more in the building and that's it. There are rumors about ordering a couple more units, but in general, the Navy tends to projection, preferring pictures and expensive development work to real ships. It is quite obvious that it is impossible to solve with four or six even the most advanced ships the same tasks that are solved by three dozen simpler "ones". The quantity matters.
What could the Navy, the Ministry of Defense and the shipbuilding industry do?
Accept the concept formulated at the time by Elmo Zumwalt. A fleet of a small number of ultra-efficient, but expensive and complex ships, and a large number of simple and cheap mass ships. And if the 22350 and the future 22350M are fully entitled to claim the place of the first of them, then the second should be "extras".
And here we again turn to diesels.
Currently, in Russia there are highly professional personnel for the design of ship hulls, there is a testing base for working out the hull shapes in different conditions. There are factories that can quickly build ships of relatively small displacement. There are mass-produced systems and components, weapons and electronics. There is the Kolomna plant, which is capable of starting the construction of diesel engines right now, which can be the basis for the power plant of corvettes (and this has already been done on several projects) and frigates.
In fact, nothing prevents us for several years to create a couple of classes of mass ships on diesel power plants with serial samples of equipment and weapons (for example, an PLO corvette and a light frigate), lay them in large quantities, build and hand them over. Yes, it won't be 22350 or FREMM. But it will still be a full-fledged and dangerous warship, which, due to the absence of the need for long-term refinement and development of new components, will be built quickly and surrender without delay. At the same time, stable orders for diesel engines to the Kolomna plant will help it quickly bring the DC500 line to the series, which will increase the displacement and reduce the internal volume of the ship required to accommodate the power plant.
Moreover, the upgrade to the D500 series, including the 20SD500, will allow the diesel power plant to be scaled up to very large ships. The above is an example of Deutschland-class Kriegsmarine warships. With more than 11,000 tonnes of displacement, they had a diesel power plant of 56,000 hp. The use of the 20DS500 engine would allow such a ship to be propelled by six engines. Moreover, modern technologies for encapsulating engines, noise suppression and depreciation of power plants would reduce the noise level on the ship to an acceptable level.
This, of course, does not mean that one should do this (although the question is well worth studying). This means that in case of problems with the production of turbines or due to their hypothetical shortage (well, suddenly), the Navy will have a reserve capability. However, few people care about it today.
It is worth noting that the idea of a "Russian 054A" has been repeatedly expressed by many experts, discussed in the professional community, and even among the enthusiasts for the development of Russia's naval power, according to rumors, there are supporters among the senior officers of the fleet, the industry is quite capable of building such ships … and nothing happens.
The only bottleneck in such a project is the gearbox for the power plant. But this one problem could be somehow solved.
Interestingly, the Chinese, who are closely watching our naval efforts, understand the need to have such a massive ship for Russia too. Not for the first time, their project 054E, a special export version of the frigate, which the Chinese even gave the Russian-language name "SKR of project 054E", surfaced at naval exhibitions. A patrol ship, as we used to call ships of this class.
It will be surprising if the mediocre management of naval issues leads to the fact that our TFR or frigates (and maybe corvettes) will be made in China. Considering that Russia, both technically and economically (but for some reason not organizationally) can build such ships itself (and they will be better than the Chinese ones), this will simply be an indelible shame on all those who, by their inaction and disregard, bring the fleet until complete disintegration.
However, these people in particular are not afraid of such a prospect.
We don’t even do what we can, we don’t learn, and the result will be quite natural. Let's hope that collapse and collapse of the Navy will not become apparent as a result of military defeat.
This hope is the only thing that remains for us today.
