Daydream Notes

Pyotr Velikiy. The collapse of the USSR had a major impact on the Kirov program. By the time the lead ship Kirov was put into commission, it was 1980,  and the enormous military spending of the USSR (50% of GDP) was bringing the rest of the economy to a halt. As a result, I'm breaking up the service records into three eras: the Soviet era, the 1990s shambles, and the 2000 + stabilization of Russia. As a preamble, I thought I'd mention something only occasionally touched on when talking about the Soviet Military: the corrosive nature of their military-industrial complex. Jobs producing military goods were higher status in the Soviet Union, as well as relatively well paying. While there were lots of other things driving Soviet military budgets (especially in the early 1980s, when the Cold War reached a peak of hostility) communist party officials could best bring home the bacon for their constituents by getting more military production in their district. I suspect that some...

Pyotr Velikiy (Peter the Great.) Battleships were over by the time the Second World War ended. Aside from the US Navy (who being a superpower could afford to be sentimental about massively expensive warships) what battleships remained at the end of World War 2 were decommissioned and scrapped with astonishing rapidity, considering in World War 2 the very same ships were thought of as critical strategic assets. Why battleships fell completely out of favor is a pretty simple story. Battleships were enormously expensive to build and to man, and the march of technology had made them very vulnerable – both to submarines and to aircraft. The development of the first guided munitions in World War 2 was a knock against them, as going forward it would be far easier to design weapons with enough explosive to negate a battleship's armor. Another factor was that aircraft carriers had proven themselves as capable of taking over their role of defeating enemy warships at vastly greater enga...

Note: this infodump is quick and dirty, mostly just me rattling around the internet.  I have two sources for this infodump: a Osprey book on Soviet Battlecrusiers, and this extensive, very interesting series of posts on the Kirov-class auto-translated from Hungarian by Google Chrome. If the dog of truth is indeed menaced with the opportunity of being fucked, just holler at me. The start of nuclear powered battlecruisers for the Soviets starts in a very familiar place for anybody familiar with the Cold War: the other side had 'em, therefore we need to close that gap! The USS Enterprise , the missile cruiser USS Long Beach , and the cruiser USS Bainbridge were United States Navy experiments in nuclear powered warships. The Soviets looked at these ships and decided it was high time a nuclear powered warship of the people was built. While the Soviet Navy had been sketching designs for nuclear powered warships since the early 1950s, only one surface ship, the civilian icebr...

Finished a new model some time ago: the 1/700 Admiral Nakhimov from Dragon/Cyber Hobby. It came out of a Cyber Hobby Orange box. For those that don't know, Orange Box is Dragon's bargain boxes: older molds sold cheaper, often with multiple kits/nice extras.  The Admiral Nakhimov is practically an action playset: in addition to the Nakhimov, the kit comes with a Los Angeles class submarine, Several Ka-27 helicopters, a S-3 Viking, a P-3 Orion, and a Seahawk helicopter. The kit itself is pretty good I think; the only place you feel like you are missing something is photo-etch for the antennas. PE also would have been good for the helicopter rotor blades.  It's been a very long time since I built a ship, so I approached the whole thing as a learning experience. Getting the right color for the anti-fouling paint on the deck proved challenging - I think it is a blend of three different colors - and masking the helicopter deck took a few tries. ...