Lun-acy

The picture above is not the scheme of some half-educated warfreak engineer (ahem). Well, it's not just that. It's a real machine! The Lun is a Russian.. umm, I guess the phrase is "ground effect vehicle", which uses wings to create a cushion of air that lifts it above the water, drastically reducing drag. The end result, in the case of the Lun, is a 300 ton vehicle that can travel at almost 350 miles an hour! Beter than just dreaming up such a monstrosity, the Soviet Union (not Russian, stricly speaking) built one of these vehicles. Proof is found below:

Notice the 6 Sunburn anti-ship missiles (Moskit variant)carried atop the fuselage. I totally dig the blast deflectors and the cabin directly beneath the muzzle of the two forward canisters. I'll bet the most junior crew members ride in there! To quote Skipper the Penguin from Madagascar: "We'll need special tactical equipment. We're gonna face extreme peril. Private probably won't survive. "

I cannot believe the entire vehicle was airborne, as evidenced in this picture of a launch. I can only wonder how it would handle heavy surf. Both the above pictures reveal search radars, and possible communication equipment, in the tail. Judging by the sensors, gross speed and heavy armament (almost 10,000 pounds of weight per missile!), this thing must have been intended to independently seek and destroy heavily defended targets. Against most anti-ship cruise missiles, the Lun's high speed would have made interception very difficult, and higher velocity anti-aircraft missiles may have struggle at making such low-altitude attacks. Plus, the small warheads on most anti-aircraft missiles might have been insufficient to down such a hog before it completed its attack run. I can only imagine what difficulties the designers faced trying maintain vehicle balance and trim with a mere several meter margin of error when discharging 5 tons of payload almost instantaneously.

The Soviets only built a single prototype. Perhaps there were too many technical limitations. Perhaps coordinating with other elements of a strike force (submarines, aircraft, conventional surface ships) proved too unwieldy. Perhaps the turn radius was 10 miles! I can only wonder. Nonetheless, the Lun, dubbed the "Caspian Sea Monster" by Western observers, is... something else.