«Baku» Aircraft Carrier 1143

A new giant has appeared in the ranks of the USSR Navy - the heavy aircraft-carrying missile cruiser Baku. Its 12 P-500 "Basalt" missiles are capable of disabling any modern ship, rapid-firing artillery guns can destroy small and medium-sized ships, and a massive aviation group and 8 AK-630 guns casts doubt on any attempts to sink an aircraft carrier.

This building was inspired by the movie "The Case in Square 36-80"

The ship was laid down in 1978 at Nikolayev South (Shipyard No.444) in Ukraine, launched in 1982, and commissioned in December 1987.
The delay in commissioning was largely caused by software bugs in the new command and control system.
Ship was renamed Admiral Gorshkov after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, as the city of Baku was now in independent Azerbaijan. Sergey Gorshkov was responsible for the expansion of the Soviet Navy during the Cold War.


The fourth of the aircraft-carrying cruisers of Project 1143, the Baku had many differences from the rest of the class, testing the technologies that will be used on the Admiral Kuznetsov. The most obvious is the massive passive electronic scanning matrix above the bridge. It was a phased array antenna for the Mars-Passat 3D aerial search radar ("Sky Watch"). Sky Watch turned out to be problematic and probably never worked.[9]

The biggest change in the weapons systems was the replacement of the 4K60 (SA-N-3 "Cup") and 9K33 Osa (SA-N-4 "Gecko") SAM launchers with four VLS SA-N-9 "Mittens" launchers. This made it possible to place two more 4K80 launchers (SS-N-12 "Sandbox"). Two Kiev anti-aircraft guns were replaced with 100 mm guns, and the SUW-N-1 launcher was dismantled.

The air wing was the same as the other Kiev, and consisted of a squadron of twelve strike fighters Yak-38 ("Forger") V / STOL (until they were decommissioned in 1992), dven