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voor de liefhebbers van modelbouw en submarines :)

Fly Model 142 - K-141 Kursk submarine

K-141 Kursk was an Oscar-II class nuclear cruise missile submarine of the Russian Navy, lost with all hands when it sank in the Barents Sea on August 12, 2000. Kursk, full name ??????? ????????? ?????, which translated, means the nuclear powered submarine "?????" [??? "?????"] in Russian, was a Project 949A ????? (Antey, Antaeus but was also known by its NATO reporting name of Oscar II). It was named after the Russian city Kursk, around which the largest tank battle in military history, the Battle of Kursk, took place in 1943. One of the first vessels completed after the fall of the Soviet Union, it was commissioned into the Russian Navy's Northern Fleet.

Background
Work on building the Kursk began in 1990 at Severodvinsk, near Arkhangelsk. Launched in 1994, it was commissioned in December of that year. It was the penultimate of the large Oscar-II class submarines to be designed and approved in the Soviet era. At 154m long and four stories high it was the largest attack submarine ever built. The outer hull, made of high-nickel, high-chrome content stainless steel 8.5 mm thick, had exceptionally good resistance to corrosion and a weak magnetic signature which helped prevent detection by Magnetic Anomaly Detection (MAD) systems. There was a two-metre gap to the 50.8 mm thick steel inner hull.[citation needed]

The Kursk was part of Russia's Northern Fleet, which had suffered funding cutbacks throughout the 1990s. Many of its submarines were anchored and rusting in Andreyeva Bay, 100 km from Murmansk.[1] Little work to maintain all but the most essential front-line equipment, including search and rescue equipment, had occurred. Northern Fleet sailors had gone unpaid in the mid-1990s. The end of the decade saw something of a renaissance for the fleet; in 1999, the Kursk carried out a successful reconnaissance mission in the Mediterranean, tracking the US Navy's Sixth Fleet during the Kosovo War. August 2000's training exercise was to have been the largest summer drill — nine years after the Soviet Union's collapse — involving four attack submarines, the fleet's flagship Pyotr Velikiy ("Peter the Great") and a flotilla of smaller ships.

[edit] Explosion
For more details on this topic, see Russian submarine Kursk explosion.
The Kursk sailed out to sea to perform an exercise of firing dummy torpedoes at the Pyotr Velikiy, a Kirov class battlecruiser. On August 12, 2000 at 11:28 local time (07:28 UTC), there was an explosion while preparing to fire the torpedoes. The only credible report to date is that this was due to the failure and explosion of one of the Kursk's hydrogen peroxide-fueled supercavitating torpedoes. It is believed that HTP, a form of highly concentrated hydrogen peroxide used as propellant for the torpedo, seeped through rust in the torpedo casing. A similar incident was responsible for the loss of HMS Sidon in 1955.

The chemical explosion detonated with the force of 100-250 kg of TNT and registered 2.2 on the Richter scale. The submarine sank in relatively shallow water at a depth of 108 metres (350 ft), about 135 km (85 miles) from Severomorsk, at 69°40'N 37°35'E? / ?69.667°N 37.583°E? / 69.667; 37.583. A second explosion 135 seconds after the initial event measured between 3.5 and 4.4 on the Richter scale, equivalent to 3-7 tons of TNT.[2] One of those explosions blew large pieces of debris back through the submarine.

The length of the Kursk exceeded the depth at which it sank by 46 metres (150 ft).

Dank aan OZD :)