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New subs made of old spare parts

The "Yury Dolgoruky" (Sevmash.ru)

The Russian navy’s two newest nuclear-powered strategic submarines that are sailing the White Sea this autumn are partly constructed from near 20 year old hulls of non-finished smaller submarines.

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The two submarines of the Borey class are the first new strategic submarines in the Russian navy since the last Delta-IV class submarine was commissioned in 1992. But, “Yuri Dolgoruky” and “Aleksandr Nevsky” are not totally new, Rossiskaya Gazeta reports.

When the construction of “Yuri Dolgoruky” started at the Sevmash yard in Severodvinsk back in November 1996, the shipyard simply took the unfinished hull of an unfinished Akula-class attach submarine and started the welding to enlarge it. The construction work on the hull for what was supposed to be an Akula-class was started four years earlier, in 1992, according to the list of submarines posted on Wikipedia.

The hull of the second Borey-class submarine “Aleksandr Nevsky” is also originally based on an older Akula-class submarine that was never finished. “Aleksandr Nevsky” sailed out on her maiden voyage in the White Sea last Saturday, reports Regnum.

The work on the hull of what was then supposed to be the “Lynx” Akula-class submarine started at the shipyard in Severodvinsk back in 1993 and then, 11 years later in 2004, the shipyard brushed off the dust of the hull and started to refit it to what is now “Aleksandr Nevsky.”

According to Rossiskaya Gazeta, the old block sections used to build the new Borey class submarines were the forward and rear end.

The construction of the third submarine of the Borei-class, “Vladimir Monomakh” started in 2006 and is today some 50 percent ready, reports Itar-Tass. According to the book Korabli VMF SSSR (Naval vessels of the USSR), published in St. Petersburg in 2003, also the third Borei-class submarine, named “Vladimir Monomakh” is originally based on a Akula-class hull from 1992.

It is not know if any of the other parts of the new submarines consists of spare parts from older submarines.