ANTEY

Description

Project 949 Granit / Oscar I

Project 949A Antey / Oscar II

The Oscar-class nuclear-powered cruise missile attack submarine, which displaces more than 18,000 tons when under water, is one of Russia's largest and most capable submarines. As with earlier cruise-missile submarine, the Oscar was designed primarily to attack American aircraft carrier battle groups.

As with other Russian submarines, the Oscar features a double hull -- and inner pressure hull and an outer hydrodynamic hull, with eight inches of rubber between them to muffle sounds. American submarines have a single pressure hull, with additional hydrodynamic fairings, such as the cap that encloses the bow sonar dome. The 3.5 meter separation between the inner and outter hulls on the Oscar provides significant reserve buoyancy, and improved survivability against conventional torpedoes. These large submarines are said to be slow to dive and maneuver, though they are credited with a submerged speed of about 30 knots - sufficient to keep pace with their targets. The improved Oscar II is about 10 meters longer than the Oscar I, possibly making room for a quieter propulsion system, and feature upgraded electronic systems. The Oscar II is also characterized by a substantially enlarged fin, which should improve underwater manueverability, as well as the substitution of the Oscar-I's four-bladed propeller with a (presumably) quiter seven-blade propeller.

The Oscars are rather poorly characterized in the open literature, with substantial discrepancies in reported submerged displacement (the upper estimates are probably closer to the mark) and maximum submerged speed - reportedly classified intelligence estimates have tended upward over time. Considerable confusion also exists as to the names of some units. During the Cold War essentially no information was publicly available concerning the names of Soviet submarines, and with the end of the Cold War the Russian Navy has exibited an annoying tendency to rename ships (a very un-American practice). And unlike the American practice, in which hull numbers are generally assigned in a consecutive numerical sequence which corresponds to the chronological sequence of construction, the pennant numbers assigned Russian submarines (eg, K-141) do not conform to an apparent set pattern.

The submarine is equipped with two dozen SS-N-19 missiles with a range of 550-kilometers - three times as many anti-ship cruise missiles as earlier Charlie and Echo II class submarines. The missiles, which are launched while the submarine is submerged, are fired from tubes fixed at an angle of approximately 40 degrees. The tubes, arranged in two rows of twelve each, are covered by six hatches on each side of the sail, with each hatch covering a pair of tubes. The launchers are placed between the inner pressure hull and the outer hydrodynamic hull. The torpedo tubes fire both torpedoes and shorter range anti-ship missiles, and a combination of some two dozen weapons are carried.

The Project 949A submarines have a total of at least ten separate compartments, which can be sealed off from each other in the event of accidents. The compartments are numbered sequentially from fore to aft, with the two separate reactor compartments numbered V and V-bis (which is accounts for the fact that there are ten compartments, though the numbers only run through nine).