plan to behave as the eye and ears of the Soviet Pacific Fleet , this monolithic command ship was among Russia ’s most ambitious Cold War constructs . Packing cutting edge electronic war and communications systems , this enormous ship could have become the monolithic centerpiece of Russia ’s navy . So why did it end up rotting off as off - shore barracks instead ?
Commissioned in 1989 , the Ural ( SSV-33 ) was a 265 meter longsighted , 36,000 - ton communications and intelligence gathering vessel manoeuvre by the Soviet dark blue at the tail end of the Cold War . The Ural perform a kind of part during its decade of service , include that of swift flagship , space and projectile trailing , electronic warfare and reconnaissance mission , and as a communications relay race .
The Ural was build from an earlier Kirov category cruiser designing and powered by a brace of 171 MWt nuclear reactors work in tandem bicycle with an oil turbine to produce a whopping 66,500 HP , enabling speeds in excess of 21 knot . Not regretful for a ship so large that nearly 1000 sailors were need to operate it .
Sporting the latest and slap-up in Soviet electronics , the Ural volunteer one and only intelligence assembly capableness . Not only good at key out and tracking airborne , surface , and submersed threats , the Ural could even keep tabs on passing planet and smear ICBM ’s before they reentered the atmosphere , rapidly evaluating and disseminating that intelligence to the rest of the fleet in near substantial - sentence — an unheard of capability at the time . What ’s more , its electronic warfare systems were hefty enough to span the comprehensiveness of the Pacific sea , reserve the Ural to impart operations without ever leave port .
Not that it actually could go forth . The Ural was so overwhelmingly large that there was n’t a pier in the Pacific big enough to bob it . As such , it had to be anchored just offshore with supplies and soldiery ferried out to it by smaller ships . The Ural evidence so costly to operate — without even being deploy — that it was eventually converted into a floating barrack for naval officers before being decommission and scrapped in 2001 .
[ English Russia – Global Security – Military Today ]
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