domingo, 4 de janeiro de 2015

U BOAT

We have heard a very interesting news from Russia.

Their new Borei-class SSBN "Vladimir Monomach" completed her first voyage, on Dec. 29, from Severodvinsk, where she had been built, to the Northern Fleet's main submarine base of Gadzhyevo in the Murmansk Region. At Gadzhyevo, she was berthed at a newly built quay specially for the Borei-class submarines.
     I spell it "Borei" as the Russians do. In the U.S. Navy, they spell it "Borey", which is also a NATO name. The word originates from the Greek God "Boreas", who controls northerly winds.
     The interesting thing is, they said, that in building "Monomach", they made use of the hull of the older submarine, which had been broken up as scrap. That submarine is "Ak Bars (K-480)" -- one of the Akula-1 boats -- which was commissioned on Dec. 31 1988, and was retired in 1998. She was sent to the scrap yard in February 2010. By the way, "Akula" is a NATO name, which means "shark" in Russian.  The Russian name is "Shchuka-B", meaning "pike" in Russian.
     It is quite a feat to build a new submarine out of a scrapped old boat. Let us compare those two submarines more closely.
                                             displacement (submerged)        length                  beam
Akula-1                                 12,770 ton                             110 meters            13.6 meters
Borei                                     19,400 ton                             170 meters            13.5 meters

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