Watch Russia’s Only Operational Battlecruiser Launch A Massive “Shipwreck” Anti-Ship Missile

"These missiles were designed in the late 1970s and intended to allow Russia’s future capital ships to be able to reliably strike American carrier battle groups from outside the range of their surface-based weapon systems. In combat, the missiles would be launched in large salvos, they would then scream toward their targets as fast as mach 2.5 at altitude or at about mach 1.5 while low over the water. 

The missiles were very advanced for their time, integrating networking and automated cooperative “swarm” tactics. They were launched at a target (or targets) usually based on third party data, such as coordinates derived by a scout ship, a maritime patrol aircraft, or even a submarine. They would fly toward their targets from over 350 miles away on inertial navigation, then as they approached the suspected target area, one missile out of the swarm would “pop up” to higher altitude to use its own active radar and anti-radiation sensors to obtain updated targeting info. It would then classify these targets and assign them to missiles in the swarm below. 

If the pop-up missile was destroyed another one would automatically take its place. The missiles could also accept midcourse updates from third party sources as well and supposedly had connectivity to the now defunct Soviet-era EORSAT satellite network. Once in the terminal attack phase of their flight, each surviving missile would acquire its own target and prosecute that target, blazing over the horizon at supersonic speeds and giving (presumably) American close-in weapon systems little time to react. 

There is no doubt, the P-700 was born to be a high-end carrier killer. Their speed and numbers would overwhelm a Carrier Battle Group’s defenses, and their individual warheads were large enough to register a kill even on America’s largest surface combatants. 

The Soviet Navy’s aspirations were clear, with twenty of these monsters available on Kirov class battlecruisers, two dozen on Oscar class nuclear guided missile submarines, and a dozen on the carriers that would eventually be known as the Kuznetsov class, Soviet surface action groups could have filled the air with these deadly missiles."

"These refitted Kirov class battlecruisers will supposedly feature a whole new set of sensors and subsystems, and most ominously, weapons. Russia’s TASS news agency reports that the ships will receive totally updated multipurpose vertical launch systems, making these ships capable of carrying a much wider variety of anti-ship missiles and many more of them.

Navyrecognition.com sums up this upgrade well, and their analysis is consistent with other sources on the matter:

The Sevmash Shipyard and the Special Machinebuilding Design Bureau (KBSM, a subsidiary of Almaz-Antei) made a deal for 10 3S-14-11442M vertical launch systems (VLS) to equip the Project 11442M Admiral Nakhimov missile cruiser being upgraded now. The contract is valued at 2.559 billion rubles ($33.5 million).

Thus, the ship’s 20 inclined below-deck launchers of P-700 Granit antiship missiles (SS-N-19 Shipwreck) will be replaced with 10 VLS modules of the UKSK versatile ship-based launch system. The VLS modules will total 80. The same solution is expected to be applied to the Pyotr Veliky cruiser.

The 3S-14 VLS can launch the missiles of the Kalibr family (SS-N-27 Sizzler). In addition, the equipment for testing the VLS using mockups of the 3M-54, 3M55 and 3M22 antiship missiles is to be ready be December 2016...”

TASS reports that the upgraded Kirovs will house a mix of hypersonic Zircon, supersonic Onix and long-range subsonic Kalibr cruise missiles, and that with an arsenal of 80 anti-ship missiles stuffed in their vertical launch tubes, these ships will have have “enough to engage any existing naval force globally.”