Project 1171 (Tapir) class landing ship (NATO reporting name: Alligator) is a class of Soviet / Russian general purpose, beachable amphibious transport docks (Soviet classification: Large landing ship, Russian: БДК, большой десантный корабль).
Design of Project 1171 was initiated in 1959 by the Navy, while a similar dual-purpose Project 1173 was ordered by the civilian Ministry of Shipping. Eventually both designs were merged under Project 1171 umbrella, and the resulting ship was a compromise between military (speed, survivability) and civil (fuel economy) objectives. Design team produced four different configurations of the ship. The Navy selected the most powerful and fastest option, which was also least fuel-efficient, and the civil Ministry withdrew from the project completely. All production ships were made for the Navy and never operated on shipping lines.
A total of 14 vessels were completed between 1964 and 1975; all were retired in 1992–1995. As at September, 2008, two vessels, currently named Orsk and Saratov are in active service with the 179-th brigade of Russian Black Sea Fleet. An unidentified number remains in reserve.
Saratov (БДК-65) was launched in July 1964, commissioned in 1966 as Voronezhsky Komsomolets. As a leader ship of a formation, it lacked the habitable troops compartments installed on other ships of the class. Saratov was stationed in Donuzlav (Black Sea Fleet) until the Union collapsed and then remained mothballed in Odessa until 1994. The ship was reported in active operations in 2000 and later.
Orsk (БДК-69) was launched and commissioned in 1968 as Nikolay Obekov. It served a total of 11 campaigns in Indian and Atlantic oceans and the Mediterranean. Later, under Russian flag, it carried peacekeeping troops and materials to Yugoslavia, Adjaria and Abkhazia.
Some vessels were used in the 2008 South Ossetia war.
Famous quotes containing the words alligator, class, landing and/or ship:
“Every incident connected with the breaking up of the rivers and ponds and the settling of the weather is particularly interesting to us who live in a climate of so great extremes. When the warmer days come, they who dwell near the river hear the ice crack at night with a startling whoop as loud as artillery, as if its icy fetters were rent from end to end, and within a few days see it rapidly going out. So the alligator comes out of the mud with quakings of the earth.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“There is a certain class of people who prefer to say that their fathers came down in the world through their own follies than to boast that they rose in the world through their own industry and talents. It is the same shabby-genteel sentiment, the same vanity of birth which makes men prefer to believe that they are degenerated angels rather than elevated apes.”
—W. Winwood Reade (1838–1875)
“I foresee the time when the painter will paint that scene, no longer going to Rome for a subject; the poet will sing it; the historian record it; and, with the Landing of the Pilgrims and the Declaration of Independence, it will be the ornament of some future national gallery, when at least the present form of slavery shall be no more here. We shall then be at liberty to weep for Captain Brown. Then, and not till then, we will take our revenge.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.”
—W.H. (Wystan Hugh)