The ‘Caspian Sea Monster’ rises from the grave
cnn.com
cnn.com
> Today, the Ekranoplan–the only Lun ever built—lies stranded off a beach in the Caspian Sea. This summer, the craft was in the process of being towed from a nearby naval base to a museum when something appeared to have gone terribly wrong. Instead of making it to its new home, the Ekranoplan ended up stranded in shallow water, where it's drawing visitors. https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/aviation/a33808381...
However, this article today claims that the beach was the intended destination:
> "Lun" will be the star of Derbent's planned Patriot Park, a military museum and theme park that will display different sorts of Soviet and Russian military equipment. Construction of the park is expected to start later in 2020. For the time being, Lun will sit alone on the beach.
Checking the famous photo article that was already linked from that article two months ago, it seems that the “something appeared to have gone terribly wrong” was just speculation by Popular Mechanics:
> This summer, Russian urban explorer Lana Sator, 31, read about the ekranoplan being towed by sea to Derbent, a city in Daghestan, where it is due to be moved into a "patriotic park” and put on permanent display. https://www.rferl.org/a/photographer-sneaks-inside-the-legen...
Derbent is on the west shore of the Caspian Sea, close to Azerbaijan: https://www.openstreetmap.org/search?query=derbent%2C%20dagh...
As any sailor will tell you, it is seldom as smooth as the water that you always see in photos of these birds under flight.
It's like tourism photos of Ireland, where green fields are always under clear skies.
Think of these vehicles as floating on a layer of "thick air" above the ocean. They bounce through that air like a boat on the waves. If the layer is rough enough they will bounce more deeply into it the same way a boat will sink the bow deeper into large waves. If the sea is rough enough they go through the ground effect layer and hit the wave below. Bouncing off the waves without crashing necessitates a reduction in speed that kind of makes these vehicles useless compared to boats.
A big issue they all share, with all other seaplanes, is that taking off in rough seas is terrible, and very stressful on both passengers and superstructures.
The problem is that just one monster wave is disaster. The bigger you make the device, the bigger the wave it can take. But to justify a bigger machine, you need to have it transporting a higher volume of people. Which means that you only hit the break-even point for ground effect vehicles where lots of people want to quickly get from point A to point B over relatively calm seas. And ideally a relatively short distance so you can pick up lots of fares for your time spent over the water.
However wherever you have those conditions, you have the perfect economic conditions to build a bridge or a tunnel. That may be more expensive, but solve the problem better.
They do have limited military use. There you only want to use it once, the people you are transporting can accept higher risk than civilians would, and being able to ignore mines is a huge win. But again, only some military theaters benefit, and getting the machine where it needs to be can be a challenge.
A more reasonable approach might be hovercraft ferries, like they have in Dover, UK. At least the equipment already exists.
https://speyer.technik-museum.de/en/spaceshuttle-buran
Mayors — add this to the list of cool things you are able to do when your city is situated on a massive navigational river: buy up old stuff and make an awesome technical museum.
But it's certainly cool!
For another, only (IIRC) two of the engines are used during cruise. The other six are only used to build up enough speed to break free of the water, and accumulate hours at a much lower rate.
There are two reasons.
The Caspian Sea is a sea and not an ocean. The waves are a fraction of the size of those in the Atlantic. If 'waves were roads' then you would need a four wheel drive equivalent of the 'sea monster' to make it an 'ocean monster'. Ground effect isn't ground effect in quite the same way if you have to fly 50m above the water instead of 5m.
The other reason is that the Soviet Union did not have any realistic ambitions to invade the United States. Their thinking was much more defensive than Western Cold War thinkers were allowing their paranoia to believe.
Boeing was throwing around proposals for a ground effect aircraft several times this large in the early 2000's, with the largest bumping up against the weight range of naval destroyers at ~5000 tonnes.
The only area where this might be useful is in the Great Lakes, at that point the USSR already had to invade Canada at the least and establish a sufficient presence to support these things, and even then it’s not clear if it would be more useful than traditional transport.
These things are cool from an engineering point of view but are quite useless in real world applications.
I wonder if cruising over the Arctic ice would've worked...
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/photography/proof/2017/03...
Definitely not the place for these.
This is not true. For one, the Soviet Union never had any plans for the invasion of the U.S.
One thing they did better in the cold war was understanding the political results of potential military actions.
Because of this, they never had any misconceptions of a major conventional war directly between superpowers that lasts more than two weeks before either being resolved or going nuclear. This informed everything about how they built up their military, from the tiniest piece of equipment to overall doctrine. Once you understand this, a lot of their equipment and thinking is a lot more sensible. (For example, the way their logistical organization is set up. A tank division, and the tanks in it, are supposed to give maximum possible effort for about two weeks after which it doesn't matter what shape they are in.)
Any concept of a Soviet invasion of the US is fanciful to the point of being stupid. Just because if the Soviets somehow attain the necessary conventional superiority to attempt it, and then push it, why exactly wouldn't the Americans just nuke them?
Nuclear weapons make most military plans "fanciful to the point of being stupid". We've been in a state of unavoidable mutually assured destruction since the late 1960's. This hasn't stopped weapons development. Being able to move large amounts of soldiers and weaponry around at high speed is a generally useful thing.
Russia has a lot of inland lakes, and has always defined its empire with non-negotiable geopolitical requirements for blue-water ports on all sides. The countries that pose a threat to those ports generally have a lot of vulnerable coastlines. Fly an ekranoplane empty to a staging area, fill it with a regiment, fly it in boost mode over any land obstacles, and you can rapidly drop significant troop numbers at any point on the coast without control over the body of water.
Larger ekranoplanes that can operate higher off the water are more useful as transports, and things plausibly get much bigger than the KM.
I don't think that's realistic nor has it been the goal of Soviet military doctrine, more likely targets for the Ekranoplan would have been Western Europe and Scandinavia (via the Baltic Sea), Turkey (Black Sea) and Iran (Caspian Sea).
Furthermore, if the Soviets did manage to build a practical, mass-producible design it would have been hell for radar systems (at the time). It "flies" too low for air search radar to pick up due to algorithms and methods used to eliminate false targets from ground clutter. It moves too fast for a surface search radar to register, again because of false target mitigation techniques. It occupies the same blind spot that sea-skimming cruise missiles were designed to exploit, except with much longer range and the ability to spring a half-dozen supersonic Sunburn missiles at the last minute. In a hectic theater it could have been a very effective coastal defense platform and a good complement to the Tu-16/Tu-22 long range missile carriers.
> After lying dormant for more than three decades, the Caspian Sea Monster has been on the move again. One of the most eye-catching flying machines ever built, it's completing what could be its final journey.
> In July of this year after 14 hours at sea, a flotilla of three tugs and two escort vessels maneuvered slowly along the shores of the Caspian Sea to deliver their bulky special cargo to its destination, a stretch of coast near Russia's southernmost point.
And on planet earth we do get bad weather (even at sea level). It's not as bad as in Interstellar ("these are not mountains"), but it can certainly render this useless.
Unless they target VERY SPECIFIC region (specific parts of Arab peninsula), then we are limiting the use so much that it can only survive as a niche company and not expand much.
This thing is always 'taking off' at sea level, in the thickest air possible. Fuel efficiency has to be miserable.
Normal aircraft typically spend long periods in autopilot, whereas these things would presumably require a constantly vigilant pilot. And not just to avoid big ships, there are plenty of things floating in the ocean that could destroy one of these things: small boats, buoys, debris. The mast of a small sailing dinghy would be enough to cause a catastrophic crash.
I like the idea of this kind of craft, but I can't see it working at scale.
You might be able to get it airborne without as much boost if you had the help of an intermediate phase of acceleration as a hydrofoil. The Orylonok uses a ski in this vein.
Being a hazard to shipping appears to be the purpose of it.
I will also say that at 5m from surface, good luck "seeing" it with on a radar. Also, at night and/or with mist.. you don't even see it coming.
If by boats you mean warships, then yes, they may cause a blip in a proper radar.
That said, at longer distances or rough seas things significantly degrade unless you’re talking about a big boat.
If you start steering 30 seconds after detecting an object you would still be 5+ km away, so assuming a ship is at most 200m long you would only need a 3 degree course change to miss it by more than a ships length. Maybe make it 5 degrees to miss it by 400+ meters.
Yes, at the cost of forward speed. It would be similar to a parabolic climb in an aircraft.
As for the Kamov helicopters, no idea, but apparently coaxial rotors are more efficient (e.g. better climb rate) than the traditional helicopter design. The "next generation" Sikorsky–Boeing SB-1 also uses coaxial rotors:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sikorsky%E2%80%93Boeing_SB-1_D...