During the Cold War, they tried to actively replenish the Soviet military-industrial complex with innovative projects that were supposed to strengthen the power of the domestic army. And the USSR fleet was no exception in this trend. So, a striking example of such modernization was the Hurricane project, which involved the creation of high-speed small rocket ships on hydrofoils. Here are just the only ship that was ultimately built, lasted only twenty years, and after that was cut into metal.
The project of this type of ship was developed at TsKB-5 (TsMKB "Almaz") in 1964, its author was the chief designer of the bureau V. M. Burlakov. The concept was the creation of a vessel equipped with deeply submerged automatically controlled hydrofoils. During the development of the project, an experimental passenger ship "Typhoon" was assembled as a semi-natural model.
The only ship under the Uragan project, known as the MRK-5, was laid down in 1972, and after a year of construction, it was launched at the Leningrad Primorsky plant in 1973. True, the testing period was started only three years later. The results of the checks seemed to the command satisfactory enough to enter the ship into the fleet on December 30, 1977, in the Baltic, and five years later it was sent to Sevastopol, where it was included in the 166th division of the 41st brigade of missile boats on the Black Sea.
The characteristic features of the ship's design were huge hydrofoils, which were made of titanium alloy. In the raised position, the wings protruded far to the sides at an angle of 45 degrees. The ship was propelled by a power plant, which consisted of two gas turbine engines with a capacity of 18,000 hp each. The Hurricane's top speed is 60 knots. The vessel's armament consisted of 4 Malakhit anti-ship missile launchers, 20 Osa-M anti-aircraft missile launchers (20 missiles), as well as a 1x6 30-mm AK-630 rapid-fire automatic gun mount.
But the fate of this project and the only ship built according to it turned out to be unenviable. With all the success of the vessel at sea, its operation turned out to be too difficult, but the crew was not sufficiently trained. Because of what accidents often happened on the ship. Therefore, they did not build new ships according to the project, and the only ship was excluded from the USSR Navy in 1990 and transferred to the OFI for disarmament, dismantling and implementation. True, two years later it sank as a result of a fire in Streletskaya Bay, but later it was raised and cut into metal in Sevastopol.
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