Greetings, Commanders!
It has been a long journey bringing Soviet battleships to our game.
Let’s hear from our development team
about creating each of the Soviet battleships.
It’s becoming harder and harder
to add new branches of ships into the game each year,
because we're trying to find a unique feature,
that special something for every branch…
We intend these ships to act as the tip of a spear to penetrate enemy defenses.
While this wasn’t an empty niche, it was obvious that it had potential,
and we wanted to develop that direction further—
creating brave battleships that aren't afraid of anything.
The results of some pretty serious research
enabled us to transfer the ships into the game,
where every player will be able to see them for themselves
and get a clear idea of their potential.
After the Russo-Japanese War,
in which the Russian Empire lost a significant number of their ships,
the issue of the formation, or to be more precise,
the restoration of the Russian Imperial Navy, came up.
In April 1908, a project for Sevastopol-class battleships was developed.
Gangut was one of them.
She could accelerate to 23 knots
and carried four turrets as her primary armament with three 12-inch guns each.
Four ships of this type were constructed for the Baltic fleet,
another three joined the Black Sea fleet
as Imperatritsa Mariya-class battleships.
They became the only representatives of this ship type
to ever enter service in the Russian Navy.
In 1907, following successful cruiser operations
during the Russo-Japanese War,
the development of a new armored cruiser— not yet a battleship—was launched.
In 1911, the Naval Ministry of the Russian Empire
announced an international competition to create a project for such a ship.
The Putilovsky plant together with the “Blohm und Voss” company
proposed 11 different variants for Project 707.
One of them, variant no.10, served as a basis,
from which we developed the project of our ship.
Generally, in terms of armament and mechanical layout,
you can trace similarities with Derfflinger-class battlecruisers.
The ship would have carried four primary armament turrets
with two 356 mm guns each, installed in a superfiring arrangement.
However, due to this superfiring arrangement,
which the Naval command thought to be a shortcoming,
as well as the failure to meet some other requirements of the contract,
this project was eventually rejected.
At the same time, the reasons behind this rejection
were more political than technical in nature.
As a result, two projects won the competition:
those put forward by the Admiralteysky and Baltyisky plants.
They were asked to develop a combined project, which they did.
On December 6, 1912, four Izmail-class cruisers
were laid down in Saint Petersburg.
Accelerating up to 28 knots and armed with twelve 14-inch guns
mounted in triple turrets,
these ships should have become some of the most powerful at that time.
In 1915-1916, they were launched,
however, World War I was in full swing
and the work on their fitting-out was virtually ceased.
Despite the fact
that all of the technical characteristics already existed,
we needed to introduce a gameplay component
that would allow differentiation of these ships from other in-game battleships.
There is no such vivid gap between Russian and Soviet ships.
It's a development of the former ships into the latter,
while highlighting their strengths and attempting to diminish weaknesses.
When the new gigantic country appeared on the map—
the powerful Union of Soviet Socialist Republics—
this country had its own set of ambitions.
What ambitions you might ask?
"If we're a powerful country, we have to possess a powerful Navy;
and if we have a powerful Navy, it must be an ocean-faring one."
In accordance with that program,
the USSR planned to start constructing 16 battleships by 1949.
Designing the Soviet battleships was quite a complicated task
due to the fact that the required initial materials were difficult to obtain,
or were of low quality.
For instance, there is no documentation on Soviet battleship Sinop,
apart from some sketches taken from personal archive of shipbuilder, Kostenko,
and some reconstructions made by the Russian historian, Vinogradov.
Basically, we had to use those to restore the ship
to be the way it might have been if it had been built.
These ships were never built, but, thank God,
the design sketches of these ships have been preserved.
The most difficult part was obtaining these designs.
Because on the one hand, they're still sensitive, but on the other hand,
they're not secret anymore, and are kept in archives.
The second important task
was to transform an image on decaying yellow paper into a beautiful 3D ship.
Project Vladivostok is the project of Design Bureau 4 of 1936.
It was a pretty interesting project, and an elaborate one at that,
but it also had a series of interesting inconsistencies.
For instance, the ship didn't pass the requirements for its belt stability,
thus secondary armament turrets had to be installed a deck below,
otherwise the ship wouldn’t have been able to fulfill specific tasks.
Another interesting aspect:
at the time when the ship was on tender,
the B37 gun existed only in its preliminary design form.
Even more interesting is that the gun couldn't fit into the turret
that was designed for it.
It just couldn't fit through the porthole.
That's why naval engineers had to install 406-mm 45 caliber guns
designed by the Obukhov State Plant.
That gun fit into the turret perfectly.
It seems that when the turret was being designed,
the engineers were thinking about that gun exactly.
A distinctive feature of the artillery,
which goes hand by hand with the distinctive features of the entire ship,
is that it has non-standard accuracy settings.
The guns are more accurate at close quarters up to around 12 kilometers,
while at greater distances, they have comparable or slightly worse accuracy.
The guns have been designed for pushing forward
and showing everyone what Soviet artillery is made of.
There are enough blueprints for a series of ships,
for example, for Project 23 Sovetsky Soyuz.
The quality of the blueprints was bad due to the papers suffering from decay.
We had to restore the ship's appearance using the decayed blueprints,
to somehow make the entire ship with these as its basis.
We had to redesign all of the superstructures
because they presented the biggest issue.
However, the blueprints for the hull were in an ideal state,
and thus the hull worked out great.
When such battleships as Sovetsky Soyuz were laid down and constructed,
they were magnificent, state-of-the-art ships.
Kreml is just classified, everything is top secret,
the ship remains classified even now—nothing about it is available.
The prototype of her hull was taken from a book by Vasiliev,
the only thing we had to do was recalculate and resize the hull
because we couldn't fit a larger gun in a larger turret.
That's why the ship has grown in size to 80,000 tons,
because nine 16-inch guns weren't enough for a top-tier ship.
Thus we chose 18-inch guns that had to be designed from scratch.
The country was in ruins, and the experience gained from war
suggested that they didn't have a need for such ships.
That's why the project for Kreml was never completed
and didn’t even pass the design stage.
A feature of the entire Soviet battleship branch
is their limited stock of the Damage Control Party consumable.
This feature highlights the specific character of the whole branch—
it provides better survivability while pushing forward through enemy defenses,
but players have to carefully consider their repair capabilities.
Battleship Lenin was the start of the solution
to the issue of large artillery ships for the Soviet Union.
It was initially asserted as a battleship with a displacement of 35,000 tons,
but it couldn't have been made with such proportions—
everyone could judge that by the hull contours, which were formed
upon the basis of practical cross-sections of the ship's project.
When it turned out that the ship had a displacement of around 50,000 tons,
it started to breed suspicions that someone in the chain had been lying.
As a result, when we calculated the weight loads of the ship
with all of its real armor according to the project schematics,
the ship went down to feed the fish.
We had to recalculate the project, work on the hull again, cut the armor,
and change the artillery systems which had been initially planned for the ship.
We had to design a series of systems ourselves
because the six-inch triple gun mount
which was specified in the project didn't exist in reality.
We had to invent it from scratch.
These are pure Soviet battleships.
One can say that they present the "naval Stalinist Empire style",
with their beauty, the specifics of that beauty, and their specific design.
You could feel that people put their soul, knowledge, and skill into them.
If these ships had been built in reality, they would have been prime examples
of shipbuilding in the world, and the pride of their creators.
It's very cool that this epic branch has appeared in World of Warships,
and is set to occupy a special gameplay niche
with their function as the tip of an attacking spear.
Their motto and slogan is
"I'm ahead of the curve, follow me—and we'll be victorious!"
This is one of the most interesting branches for us
in the terms of what went into its production.
Starting with the search for materials in museums and archives,
then designing them, all the way up to setting up the gameplay component.
There were a lot of arguments and plenty of unclear issues,
but as a result, the branch was made real.
Soviet battleships are an important part of shipbuilding history.
Some of them are already available in early access,
and the whole branch will come shortly.
Aaand?
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