Aviation and Military History
The main armament of the ‘Sovetsky Soyuz’ class battleships was based on a trio of electrically powered MK-1 turrets, each with three 16-in (406-mm) B-37 L/50 guns. These guns could be depressed to -2° and elevated to +45°, had a fixed loading angle of 6° and their rate of fire varied with the time required …
Continue reading “Warships that never were – the Soviet ‘Sovetsky Soyuz’ class battleship (II)”
The ‘Sovetsky Soyuz’ class comprised four battleships which were started in the late 1930s but not completed. Designed in response to the battleships being built by Germany, the class was to have totalled 16 ships, but in the event only four had been laid down by 1940, it was decided to curtail the programme to …
Continue reading “Warships that never were – the Soviet ‘Sovetsky Soyuz’ class battleship (I)”
In the period after World War II, the USSR rapidly emerged as the only power on Earth capable of challenging the USA militarily, and as wartime relations cooled toward the ‘Cold War’ situation which dominated global affairs between 1947 and 1989, the USA came to rely on nuclear (and later thermonuclear bombing) as its primary …
Continue reading “Fighters which did not make the cut: The McDonnell F-85 Goblin”
Succeeding the turbojet-powered Raduga KS-1 Komet and K-10S (AS-1 ‘Kennel’ and AS-2 ‘Kipper’) subsonic and supersonic missiles in the stand-off role against major surface forces, especially those centred on an aircraft carrier, the Raduga Kh-22 is known to NATO as the AS-4 ‘Kitchen’. This substantial long-range missile is still in service, and in an air-launched …
Where the first US stand-off nuclear missile to reach operational status, the Bell GAM-63 Rascal, was a rocket-powered weapon of typical ‘missile’ configuration, an early Soviet counterpart was of turbojet-powered aeroplane layout. This was the Raduga Kh-20 which, in the absence of firm intelligence data about its real designation, received the NATO reporting designation/name AS-3 …
Continue reading “Soviet nuclear stand-off missile – the Raduga Kh-20”
The North American AGM-28 Hound Dog was an air-launched stand-off missile developed from the late 1950s, and was created primarily to attack Soviet ground-based air defence installations and thereby open the way for Boeing B-52 Stratofortress manned bombers to attack the USSR. The missile was allocated the initial designation B-77, then GAM-77 and finally AGM-28. …
Given its huge size and enormously varied geography, the USSR – like the Imperial Russia it succeeded in 1917 – found that there was considerable scope for the use of gunboats on the country’s many large rivers, major lakes, and even its shallow coastal waters (such as the Sea of Azov and the Gulf of …
Continue reading “Soviet armoured river and coastal gunboats – the BKA and MBK types”
By the mid-1950s, it was clear that the days of the ZSU-57-2 self-propelled anti-aircraft gun mounting were numbered in terms of the system’s operational capability. For all the destructive effect of its large projectiles, the S-68 cannon possessed too low a rate of fire; the poor rates of traverse and elevation made it all but …
Continue reading “The Soviet/Russian ZSU-23-4 Shilka self-propelled anti-aircraft mounting”
There were two different Soviet tanks with the IS-4 designation. One of these was the Object 245, which was an IS-2 revised with a long-barrel 100-mm (3.94-in) D-10T gun. The other was a new vehicle projected in parallel with the IS-3 (Object 703) by the same LKZ design and development bureau. For this second iteration …
The designation Iosif Stalin was used for a series of Soviet heavy tanks developed as a successor to the KV series in World War II, and was created under the leadership of Zh. Kotin and N. Dukhov to provide the Soviet forces with a very heavy tank able to survive the fire of the German …