Total Weight: 837,000 lbs
Maximum Speed: 550 km/h
Maximum Altitude: 20 ft
Wing Span: 144 ft
Armament: 6 missile tubes, front and rear Gatling guns
Only the Soviets would slam eight jet engines and a pair of wings on a boat to see what happens. Not surprisingly, the final result can’t fly. The Lun Class Ekranoplan skims 20 ft over water by taking advantage of an aerodynamic phenomenon known as ground effect. At extremely low heights, lift reducing vortices created by the air flow over a wing cannot form. Soviet engineers decided to use this principle in the most badass way possible.
Each of the eight Kuznetsov NK-87 turbofan engines produce 28,600 pounds of thrust. What can you do with 28,600 pounds of thrust you ask? Let’s say you steal one of those bad boys and bolt it to the roof of your car. In 12.2 seconds various pieces of you and car would be passing through the sound barrier. Now imagine eight such engines and you can start to get an idea of how crazy the Lun Ekranoplan is.
The idea behind the Ekranoplan was that it flew so low that it would not be detected on radar. An added effect of this idea was scaring the shit out of the pilots. On the first flight, the crew was instructed to avoid waves. How do you avoid a wave when skimming over the water surface at 550 km/h? Did you think Tom Cruise was a sexy-living-on-the-edge-of-danger fighter pilot in Top Gun? Think again. The ballsy pilot of the century award goes to some nameless Russian pilot desperately trying to dodge waves in a plane with a billion jet engines strapped to it, that could not fly, and weighed as much as a fully loaded Boeing 747.
The large cargo capacity of the Lun allowed it to carry several hundred troops or ten battle tanks with fuel and ammunition. In my humble opinion, sending Ekranoplans full of tanks across the Atlantic would be the most epic invasion of all time. Big style points for the USSR. At the end of the day though, you have to admire the ingenuity of the Soviets. Pulling off such a crazy idea demonstrates the type of epic achievement that engineers are capable of. Big things rock!
Photo Captions:
Convincing Russia to start mass producing jet cars shouldn’t be hard if we start now.
Seriously, it can’t go higher than this.
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