OK, first thoughts. I see four pairs SS-N-12 launchers seemingly intact. Major damage seems to be in way of the midships deckhouse with AK-630 CIWS. That's a fair amount of cookoff if the ammo catches. The black patches seem to be smoke from shattered windows. 1/n
Discolouration on the hull at the waterline may be; side shell blown out by internal explosion; the hole where the missile went in; paint peeling due to the heat of the fire. I don't know what delay Neptune's fuze has, so it could have exploded deep in the ship. 2/n
Liferafts and ships' boats seem to have been launched - note the rather distinctive boat crane is deployed. So a large proportion of the crew may have gotten off. However it is clear smoke has spread throughout the after 1/2 of the ship. And that stuff is nasty. 3/n
As a minor aside, note the very low freeboard in way of the SA-N-4 launcher. Soviet-era ships have this very long quarterdeck and it's not a great idea as you have a lot less reserve of buoyancy. 3/n
The engagement radars for SA-N-4 and SA-N-6 both appear to be stowed. Given that the fire monitors seem to have been abandoned running I think it unlikely the radar were carefully stowed after the hit: This would lend credence to the story the crew were distracted by a UAV 4/n
The UAV would be an easy target so they may have been watching to see what it did. The distraction here is conceptual - it's not that they are looking the wrong way, it's that they are focussed on the wrong *type* of threat. This has happened to others before. 5/n
Labelled cutaway of Project 1164 here. Suspect point of impact was in way of the forward gas turbine room. Either in the hull or perhaps the superstructure, straight into the CIWS. AK-630 FCR Bass Tilt has a reversionary surveillance mode IIRC but I doubt it was in use. 10(?)/n
I mean 6/n, derp.
Another image here. Note the "knuckle" running the length of the hull. It looks to be still nearly horizontal, so if there is a trim angle, it is small. Flooding (at the point of this photo) may have been confined to amidships, but submergence of the deck aft is imminent 7/n
What's surprising is how far the smoke has spread. Whilst he seems to have been largely abandoned at this point, the bulk of the smoke is coming from amidships but again we see soot on the hull. This implies a rapid spread of smoke from fires subsequently extinguished 8/n
This raises questions about what damage control state the ship was in - I suspect low, as others have pointed out there was not much expectation of attack and WTDs are a pain to constantly operate. Smoke boundaries do not appear to have worked. 9/n
Of course we have to remember that a hit in the forward GT room is also close to some of the main command spaces, so co-ordinating the "internal battle" would have been very difficult 10/10 (for now)
"The Photo", for reference:
"1" marks lower hull damage that may be the result of a strike or the subsequent internal fire. "2" marks what appears to be a destroyed deckhouse (IIRC these ships have some aluminium in the deckhouses). However 2 could be due to cook-off of the AK-630 mag. Or a missile hit.
A point on hull shape. I don't see any evidence of hull overall hull sagging at this point. Straight lines added in MS Paint. The visible smoke fits with an internal fire involving a substantial amount of non-fire retardant, smoke generating materials, and 1/2
...and the presence of paint over most of the hull (on the side we can see, anyway) makes a widespread high-temperature fire unlikely. *Based on this one photograph only*. I would be *very* surprised if internal furnishings met modern fire resistance standards. 2/2
Note that we now know the fire monitors are on a tug on the far side of Moskva - not much change to the analysis, but added for completeness.

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Apr 18
OK. Some preliminary results. Any more detailed than this is work stuff and probably won't be put here. This is a very quick model using the published profile. Assuming a missile hit in the forward gas turbine room which floods that and the spaces either side 1/n Image
(this is pretty typical) the ship trims by the bow. What gives us the list and level trim is firefighting water on No 2 deck. Using some standard NATO assumptions for a firefighting effort against a fire spreading aft, we end up with a reasonable match, for a first go 2/n
Of course, this is all very approximate - compartment permeability, tank loading levels, detail internal arrangement will all impact this, but that's effort beyond a public thread. It is worth noting that if the crack aft were actually a crack, we would get: 3/n Image
Read 5 tweets
Sep 16, 2021
On warship aesthetics. When this become a consideration to NATO navies in the 1970s, a few papers resulted. Roach and Meier reconstructed the Spruance to be a bit more mean-looking (Roach & Meier, “Visual Effectiveness in Modern Warship Design”, NEJ Dec 79) 1/10
Looking to future designs, Kell described future FFG-7 & DD-963 replacements with aesthetic considerations. Of course, they changed the equipment a bit as these were intended to represent the *next* ships. (Kell, “Engineering Aesthetics in Warship Design”, NEJ Oct 81) 2/10
Canadians were getting in on the aesthetic action. Details such as the cut-down transom aft of the flight deck and the “collar” on the funnel also originated in this work. (Wiseman, “The Mean Look Part II”, Canadian Maritime Engineering Journal, Winter 1983) 3/10
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