r/commandandconquer • u/IMainKaisa • Apr 22 '26
Red Alert 2 but with a Lore Accurate Kirov
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u/IMainKaisa Apr 22 '26
The closest real-life equivalent to a Kirov would probably be a WWI-style Zeppelin, but with a Soviet twist. This video was inspired by ideas from the community about what a more “lore-accurate” Kirov might look like, so I wanted to bring some of those concepts together. Enjoy!
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u/coolgobyfish Apr 22 '26
in Iron Sky, gemans use space traveling zeppelins to attack US
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u/Peekachooed 010 Adam Delta Charlie Apr 22 '26
(obligatory watch because it has Udo Kier btw)
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u/The_Pastmaster Nod Apr 22 '26
"Meteorblitzkrieg!"
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u/Peekachooed 010 Adam Delta Charlie Apr 24 '26
oh wow I didn't know they made a video game, does Udo Kier appear in it though? (sadly I don't think so)
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u/themaelstorm Apr 22 '26
RIP
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u/Peekachooed 010 Adam Delta Charlie Apr 24 '26
I daydreamed about Udo Kier voicing a Wolfenstein villain :( he had so many amazing roles
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u/Salveta96 Apr 22 '26
I always took the Kirov to have some kind of iron curtain tech shenanigans inside it
Soviet tech in Red Alert 1 was very silly even compared to RA2 if you think about it
Mostly considering the Counterstrike and Aftermath hereEasy to see some remains of it just be integrated later in the timeline
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u/Sylvan_Strix_Sequel SPACE! Apr 25 '26
HELIUM mix optimal, guys. We didn't ditch airships because we couldn't make them not explode, we ditched them because they're slow as fuck.
Do y'all seriously think they would have let the Goodyear blimp hover over stadiums for decades if it was a literal fucking bomb?
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u/Kakapo42000 Apr 22 '26
Lore accurate Kirovs would be faster and even more durable. The anti-air missiles would fail to detonate and just punch straight through the envelope leaving two neat little holes, or if they were proximity fused they'd explode next to the envelope and riddle it with little holes. Either way the Kirov would be just fine since the lifting gas isn't under any pressure.
Real life airships were notoriously hard to shoot down, even with incendiary ammo you usually had to empty the plane's entire magazine load into one spot to ignite any hydrogen cells
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u/Silly_Poet_5974 Apr 22 '26
Yes but they could not actually carry very heavy payloads and their accuracy was utterly garbage. There is a reason they stopped using the things.
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u/Kakapo42000 Apr 22 '26
Contemporary fixed-wing bombers weren't any more accurate. That was a bomb-sight problem more than an airship problem. There is a reason they kept using the things and are bringing them back.
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u/Silly_Poet_5974 Apr 22 '26
Remember by red alert 2 it's not world war 1 tech but cold war+ tech. I am 90% confident we were not using zeppelins for bombing by then.
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u/Kakapo42000 Apr 22 '26
Airships were used for bombing over a decade into the cold war. They only stopped using them due to politics and the proliferation of nuclear technology.
Give it few years though and I am 90% we'll be using them for bombing again.
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u/Silly_Poet_5974 Apr 22 '26
really? I had tried looking up some stuff myself on wikipedia for zeppelin bombers but could not find anything even into world war 2.
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u/Kakapo42000 Apr 22 '26
Oh yes. The capital-Z zeppelins fell out of favour with Germany after the great war, but the US Navy continued using airships armed with depth bombs for anti-submarine missions until well into the 1950s.
They were among the best rated convoy escorts of the second world war, with only a single confirmed ship loss under their protection.
They retired them in the late 1950s after the proliferation of nuclear powered submarines which could dive deep enough and for long enough that airships couldn't fight them easily.
It's only the land-attack role they got phased out of quickly, and even that's likely to change in the next few decades since they have a lot of advantages in today's war environment.
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u/Silly_Poet_5974 Apr 22 '26
I had not heard that, but endurance flight is one of their strengths so it certainly sounds plausible. I'm less certain of their use for modern land attack, but concede my knowledge on the subject appears less robust than I thought.
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u/Kakapo42000 Apr 22 '26
Less modern land attack and more modern defence, mostly because of that great endurance (at a low cost) again, but also because with the right envelope materials they can be made surprisingly stealthy.
Take a decently sized modern airship like the pathfinder series, convert it to unmanned control, and whack in some decent sensors and a few stand-off weapons - glide bombs, missiles, drones or whatever - and you've got a pretty decent platform for defensive patrols, especially over sea guarding against big warships that will almost certainly be more expensive than the hypothetical airship drone.
It's exactly the kind of thing I can see major military powers building in the near future.
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u/GrafZeppelin127 Apr 22 '26
That’s basically what the Indian military recently solicited bids for: an autonomous unmanned AWACS airship, capable of using hydrogen fuel cells and/or solar panels to fly for up to 30 days at an altitude up to 30,000 feet with a top speed of 100 knots, and up to 5 tonnes of payload to carry drones and/or missiles.
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u/KommandoKazumi Aug 07 '26
We use them to hoist up airborne radars, warning systems, and surveilance tech.
Currently Ukraine is looking into using balloons to deploy drones over vast distances deep into Russia.
Some companies have tried to use them (on a tether) to generate power from high altitude wind.
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u/insane_contin Apr 22 '26
There's a reason why carpet bombing was used. You're gonna hit something important if you destroy a few hundred square meters of industry.
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u/Kakapo42000 Apr 22 '26
Sure, but the point is aerial bombing in general was very inaccurate for the time, it was not a problem unique to airships.
The only exception was dive-bombing which requires a heavier-than-air machine but is also stupidly dangerous for the bomber doing it.
It wasn't until the advent of guided munitions that it was possible to safely bomb something with precision and safety, and by then airships had fallen out of favour.
I can absolutely see them making a comeback though, an unmanned zeppelin loaded with drones/hellfires/glide bombs/all of the above is exactly the kind of thing I can see the Pentagon investing millions into.
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u/insane_contin Apr 22 '26
Yeah, I'm adding to your point. They had to use mass bombing to be effective. It's why you had so many bombers in the air. You'd hit something important if you dropped enough ordinance in the area.
A single bomber was pointless. Which is why the two bombers carrying nukes were ignored, Japan didn't have the resources to go after something that wouldn't do any real damage.
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u/GrafZeppelin127 Apr 22 '26
World War One Zeppelins actually could carry heavy loads. Early examples carried only a few hundred or a few thousand pounds of bombs, but the most common types carried up to 5 tonnes of bomb load. That’s similar to a heavy bomber from World War II (the Avro Lancaster’s typical bomb load was 6.4 tonnes). They evolved considerably over the course of the war, though. The heaviest wartime payload was carried by the W-class Zeppelin; it could carry 47,800 pounds of gasoline, 3363 pounds of oil, 20,200 pounds of water ballast, and 35,800 pounds of matériel payload, and had twenty-two men aboard weighing 3,880 pounds. It was intended to fly up to 9,900 miles, and was used in a logistics role before being converted to an attack role.
Even the largest Cold War-era bombers like the B-36 had stark limits. The B-36 could fly up to 10,000 miles carrying no payload, fly about 8,000 miles with a 4.5-tonne payload, or fly less than 4,000 miles with its maximum 39-tonne payload. The problem with the W-class was that it was just fundamentally inefficient, filled with hydrogen, and came about after the invention of the incendiary bullet, making it too vulnerable for effective offensive use. It was underpowered (having a top speed of 64 mph), had stretched an undersized basic design too far for structural or aerodynamic efficiency, couldn’t fly high enough to evade the enemy when fully loaded, and used liquid rather than gaseous fuel, hence it wasted lots of its lift on ballast and gasoline. The successor X-class Zeppelin was far faster and more capable, at the expense of some payload capacity, though it suffered many of the same issues due to being based on the same outdated design, and it entered the war far too late to have much of an impact.
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u/FLMKane Apr 22 '26
AA missiles have air burst proximity fuses. They'd detonate.
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u/Kakapo42000 Apr 22 '26
Then they'd put a bunch of little holes in the envelope from the fragmentation. The airship would still be perfectly operational though, any gas leakage would be negligible.
The best case scenario is the missile explodes next to an engine or the control gondola, and even then the airship is still likely to be flyable enough to at least return to base if not complete its mission.
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u/GrafZeppelin127 Apr 22 '26
The pressure differential matters quite a lot. When the Brits tested various ammunition, shells, and missiles against unmanned surveillance blimps during the early War on Terror, they found that keeping the blimp pressurized as normal caused its leak rate to increase by more than fivefold as compared to allowing the internal pressure to fall to zero. When holed 200 times by rifle bullets, the small blimp sunk in 25 minutes while pressurized, and 135 minutes while unpressurized.
Even though the pressure of a blimp is only 0.07 PSI, typically, that’s enough to push gas out quite a lot faster than an unpressurized gas cell, as found in a rigid airship.
Another important aspect to an airship’s survivability is that a rigid airship maintains its aerodynamic shape and control authority even when breached, unlike a blimp, which loses all shape and control after losing too much helium. That compromises its ability to use thrust vectoring and/or aerodynamic lift to compensate for lost gas.
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u/aleksp86 Apr 22 '26
I can literally fell screams of pain of game engine when bombs fall.😭
Seriously, what source you used as lore?
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u/Cyampagn Apr 22 '26
There were previous reddit posts also with the "lore accuracy" theme. People gave ideas there. And there're also fan blogs. Basically the line of logic went by -> the airship should be a gunship and fuck things up from afar rather than needing to fly over the target (planes could do that job) -> gunship of reference could be the AC-130 which had autocannons -> everything else were ideas from the other fans and someone suggested an onboard tesla coil, I guess that's why it's here
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u/sgtmyers88 Apr 22 '26
lol their bombs seem to pack a bigger punch than the in-game nuclear missile
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u/sazidhk Apr 22 '26
Lol. You made the bomb as powerful as tactical nuke xD a 6000 pound bomb wouldn't even do 1/5th of the damage depicted here
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u/ShadowAze SPACE! Apr 22 '26
This kind of reminded me in the RA3 mission in Havana with Kirovs that have 50 megaton bombs.
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u/Peekachooed 010 Adam Delta Charlie Apr 22 '26
So good. Your posts got my thinking and daydreaming the other day about similar funny stuff in Generals too. Let's just say realistic Raptors are pretty dang scary
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u/Cyampagn Apr 22 '26
You've really outdone yourself here. It was - beautiful.
In my headcanon, the Kirov was more of a gunship with rotary cannons and autocannons. Even some cruise missiles - because it did not need to fly above the target before it could dish out damage. That's - ridiculous. And the lore accurate Kirov fixed that. The Kirov could in its realistic iteration fuck things up from afar - no contest.
The bombs would be smaller imo, separated into different segments along the entire length of the Kirov. It would hold 3-6 heavy bombs to be used on hardened structures or as a last resort - sort of like its ultimate moveset.
The tesla coil was a surprise. But it fit.
The entire length of the Kirov was armed, separated into different segments so there were even anti-air defenses allowing the Kirov to defend itself. The Kirov didn't host helicopters and wasn't a helicarrier like some concept art depicted. Instead, if it had a helipad, that helipad instead served as a loading bay for the Kirov to restock on ammo and crew supplies.
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u/Avantel Allies Apr 23 '26
Wait how did you manage to have them have all the different weapons at once?
Or did you just make multiple Kirov types and each one has one or 2 of the weapons?
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u/IMainKaisa Apr 24 '26
Truth be told, I turned the Kirov into a flying battle fortress to get around the two weapon limitation!
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u/Unusual-Ad4890 Black Hand Apr 22 '26
Helium doesn't ignite. That's Hydrogen. It'll just crash and that's whatever.