I wonder how this was worth it. At 550km/hr it's slower than a plane and with 8 turbofans it's certainly more expensive than one.
But it's certainly cool!
But it's certainly cool!
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.
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).