Russia’s Rubin Design Group created the diesel-electric Project 667 assault submarines for the country’s Lada class. St. Petersburg celebrated the launch of the third submarine of this class on December 23. Submarine “B-587 Velikiye Luki” is its official name. The St. Petersburg class is the NATO designation for these vessels.
The Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation hopes to launch the state tests within the next several days. After these tests are finished, if they are successful, the B-587 Velikiye Luki submarine will be brought into service with the Russian Navy.
The crew is currently getting used to the submarine’s layout and its weapons and other equipment. According to Russian media, B-587 Velikiye Luki captain III Artem Gavrilov revealed the news.
He claims that the submarine’s machinery management system is state-of-the-art. It’s equipped with modern electric motors. In addition, the navigation system is brand new, albeit it has yet to be mentioned which one.
Two submarines of the St. Petersburg class have been added to the Russian Navy’s arsenal. Both the B-585, the flagship of the St. Petersburg submarine fleet, and the B-586, the second submarine in the class, bear the name Kronshtadt.
The Russian Northern Fleet includes a submarine named St. Petersburg. The submarine’s trial run was planned to be finished in 2017. However, technical issues prevented that from happening. After four years of testing, the Kronstadt Marine Plant was upgraded, and the trial operations were officially stopped.
The B-586 Kronstadt, the second submarine of the class and the first to be made in a series, also had problems when it was being built. It was supposed to go into service sometime near the end of the new millennium’s first decade, but production had to be stopped for a while, pushing back its use in combat. The B-586 Kronstadt wasn’t finished until 2013 and didn’t go into service until 2018, five years after it was finished.
The submarine’s open sea tests and trials were also put off because of this delay. So, the submarine wasn’t sent out to sea until this year, instead of several years ago. This year, they were there until the end of April.
The submarines in the Lada class are part of the fourth generation of submarines. This is a regular submarine, not a nuclear one. This class of submarines has to fight both other submarines and surface ships. Submarines of the Lada class also have weapons that can destroy targets on the coast.
They are used to lay mines and make a minefield that is very close together. Russian engineers say these submarines are different because they make very little noise. This makes it hard for enemy submarines to find them with radar.
This kind of submarine has a crew of up to 36 people. There are six 533mm compartments for torpedoes. So, the sub is armed with 18 torpedoes, three in each torpedo compartment. The deepest that the submarine can go is 300 meters.
The fastest it can swim underwater is 21 knots. A submarine in the Lada class is 66.8 meters long and a little more than 7 meters wide. Its displacement is 1765 tonnes.