Re:The ‘Caspian Sea Monster’ rises from the grave
by mannykannot on Friday October 23, 2020 @09:19AM
(#24869161)
But you do not develop a new weapons system just to run a speculative planning exercise. If this was not just a military-industrial complex boondoggle - which I suspect it was - I imagine there were some somewhat realistic plans around what it might actually be useful for.
Re:The ‘Caspian Sea Monster’ rises from the grave
by mapt on Friday October 23, 2020 @09:52AM
(#24869479)
I'll give you one right off the bat where something like this might be useful, in antiship or transport roles:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_Straits_crisis
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.
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.