Saturday, February 27, 2010

Excellent photo essay on the Caspian Sea Monster

Livejournalist igor113 has an excellent series of photos of the weird and wonderful Caspian Sea Monster.

There are photos of the flight deck (bridge? flight deck? I have no idea what to call it!), the crew quarters (the ekranoplan could stay at sea for five days), the galley, the anchor room, the forward most radome in the nose, the flight engineer control panel, some sort of damage control panel, the "engine room" and the weapons control station under the first pair of SS-N-22 tubes. The beast is truly the weird offspring of a 747 and a missile corvette; parts of it are genuinely airplane like and parts of it are genuinely ship like.  Igor climbs the tower to the tail gunner's station up on the vertical stabilizer and I am stunned by the good material condition that the area is in. In fact, the entire interior looks pretty good, good enough that it looks like with a little rehab and paint, it could be restored to operational condition pretty quickly.

Astounding.

Photos from the outside. 
Photos from the inside.
Photos of the Orlan's specially built support dock.

2 comments:

Andy said...

This is definitely not the Caspian Sea Monster but the Lun class ekranoplan. The two have a similar engine layout but that is it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lun-class_ekranoplan

Unknown said...

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Thank you for the wonderful topic you got there.



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