Free Republic

The Kirov class nuclear powered battlecruiser Admiral Nakhimov has been in dry dock undergoing a deep refit for years now, with the promise being the ship would come out the other side basically new, with a whole host of new weapons and sensors. The Russian Navy's plan is to eventually have two massive Kirov class ships operational at the same time, which will be a first in nearly two decades. Before that can happen Admiral Nakhimov's refit needs to be completed, after which the Pyotr Veliky (Peter the Great), which soldiers on today with largely all its Soviet-era weapons and...

Russia's most powerful surface combatant, the nuclear powered Kirov class battlecruiser Pyotr Veliky (Peter the Great), is a fascinating vessel to say the least. The ship is the manifestation of the Soviet Union's top naval weapons technology during the waning years of the Cold War. You can read all about it in this past profile I did on the class. Although she has received some light upgrades in recent years, Pyotr Veliky will be leaving the fleet in the next couple of years to undergo a deep refit. Her long mothballed sister ship, the Admiral Nakhimov, is finishing a similar...

The bell from HMS Hood has been unveiled by the Princess Royal to mark the 75th anniversary of the Royal Navy's largest loss of life from a single vessel. Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen - who funded the expedition to retrieve the bell from the seabed of the Denmark Strait between Iceland and Greenland - attended the event at Portsmouth Historic Dockyard where the bell has gone on display. Anne struck eight bells at midday during the ceremony, held with HMS Victory as a backdrop, watched by descendants of some of the 1,415 sailors who died when the battleship was hit...

There is no doubt that Russia’s Kirov class super-sized nuclear cruisers are charismatic fighting machines. Bristling with sensors and weaponry, and seemingly alien in design when compared to anything in the west, they are intimidating. But the truth is that they are also very dated and only one has remained in service for decades. That’s all about to change. Only one of the four Kirov class ships ever built has remained in active duty since its commissioning in the mid-1990s, that ship being the Pyotr Veliky, the flagship of the Northern Fleet. As part of the increasingly belligerent recent Kremlin...

The repetition of the myth of the fragile battlecruiser continues even as the greatest victory of the class is now just over 100 years in the past. This particular capital ship has been on the receiving end of the naval world’s harshest criticism since three of their British number met untimely ends at the May 31-June 1, 1916 Battle of Jutland. In fact, the battlecruiser was a hybrid, cost saving platform designed specifically to support a mature British strategic concept of seapower. Its heavy losses at Jutland were more to do with early 20th century capital ship design and poor...