I’m gonna go off on a tantrum, but seeing people on reddit defend this ship’s addition has absolutely infuriated me since everyone there claims that since she was laid down the Soviets absolutely could have finished her as designed despite lacking industry and technology to even produce her armor.
People really need to stop defending Soviet “paper” ships like Kronshtadt and Soyuz by saying that things like Amagi or Etna are in the game, this defense is incredibly stupid and it omits the reasons for which the ships weren’t built. Amagi was scrapped as a result of naval treaties, Etna wasn’t finished since war hasn’t developed in Italy’s favor. If not for very specific circumstances surrounding those ship’s cancellations (in Etna’s case literally scuttling) those ships were absolutely going to be finished as designed as both Japan and Italy had the industry and technology to build them. We also know the performance of the armament of those ships, as armament they were supposed to use was also present on other ships, Amagi’s 410mm guns were used on Nagato type battleships and Etna’s 135mm guns were used on Attilo Regolo, as an example.
This just isn’t the case for the Soviet fantasy ships. We have no idea how the armament of both Kronshtadt or Soyuz would perform, Kronshtadt’s guns were never built so all we have are estimations of it’s performance, which given that we are talking about Soviets, they are probably incredibly exaggerated. Soyuz’s guns were built and tested, which doesn’t change the fact that in the end, as far as I understand, we know almost nothing about those tests so we are again left with estimations of their performance, so they will most likely overperform like crazy.
Then comes the issue of Soviet armor making capability which is self-explanatory. As Smin confirmed, right now in game, Soyuz’s armor is cemented armor, which is an outright fabrication as Soviets decided to replace armor plates thicker than 200mm with face-hardened armor which was weaker, since they couldn’t make the 200mm cemented armor plates. This is the most egregious part of all of this. This whole thing regarding armor is a widely know issue and in my opinion, Gaijin cannot claim they didn’t know about it since it pops up everywhere when doing research regarding Soviet battleships. This is, in my opinion, a conscious decision to unhistorically buff the ship and it single handedly makes it a fake warships as in this configuration, it was literally impossible for Soviets to build it.
This is all something I feared for years that Gaijin would do after they announced that unfinished warships are okay. I feared they would take the designs at face value and ignore whether they could even be completed as designed. However I am all the more disappointed to see so many people, many of which probably don’t play navy or even never touched it, defend and enable this type of behavior. The sad part is, I actually really enjoy the Soviet ship design aesthetically and I would really like to get some of their warships, however this kind of bullshit, really pushes me away from playing them. I just absolutely hate how a nation with such an unremarkable navy and lack of naval expertise can have ships that weren’t finished, arguably couldn’t be finished and yet they outperform best warships of the top navies at the time.
