Russia has successfully coped with import substitution in ship engine building

On June 9, at the Amur Shipyard, the laying of the Zealous corvette of project 20385 took place. This warship will be able to use Caliber, Onyx and Zircon missiles. However, the importance of this news is not only this.

The thing is that initially the corvettes of this project were supposed to use German power plants manufactured by MTU Friedrichshafen. However, after 2014, these units were no longer supplied to Russia.



At the same time, the construction of the first two corvettes has already started at Severnaya Verf. As a result, there were only two ways out of this situation: find a replacement for the German engine or curtail the project.

A replacement has been found. Instead of a foreign unit, it was decided to use the diesel engine of the Kolomna Machine-Building Plant.

It is worth noting that replacing engines after the design stage is a very risky step. Meanwhile, our engineers coped with the task. This is evidenced by the fact that after the construction of the first two corvettes, an order was received for 4 more such ships. Zealous is the latest in the series. Importantly, according to Rear Admiral Igor Korolev, Deputy Commander of the Pacific Fleet of the Russian Federation, thanks to the domestic unit, the corvette became, literally, "the most economical ship in the history of the Navy"

But that's not all. After 2014, in addition to project 20385 corvettes, ships of projects 11540 and 1155, gas turbine units for which were produced at the Ukrainian enterprise Zorya-Mashproekt, as well as new ships for the Navy, were under attack. As a result, ship engine building in Russia had to be recreated practically from scratch.

However, now we can say with confidence that our country has coped with this task. To date, UEC has created a whole line of marine gas turbine engines with a capacity of 7 hp or more. up to 000 hp, fully covering the needs of the Russian Navy.

Finally, it is worth adding that the legendary Amur Shipyard, which turns 90 years old, is once again busy with work. Moreover, when in the 90s of the last century he lost the state defense order, many believed that the days of this enterprise were already numbered.