Azur Lane is currently in the midst of a major new event, “Snowrealm Peregrination” which sees all of the major factions joining together in Antarctica to investigate a major abnormality. The event also introduces some new Northern Parliament (USSR) shipgirls, the first META shipgirl available outside of a season or Meta Showdown, and finally makes playable a shipgirl that we’ve seen many times in previous events.
No, not IJN Yamato.
It’s time to meet SN Sovetsky Soyuz, the battleship commander of the Northern Parliament. A shipgirl with a rigging that never quite worked right, who hopes that something in Antarctica can help make her whole.
In reality, Sovetsky Soyuz was intended to be part of the Project 23 class of battleships begun by the USSR in the late 1930s. If completed, they would have been equivalent in size to Japan’s Yamato-class battleships, and America’s planned Montana-class. Armament and armor would have been weaker, however, because the USSR hadn’t figured out how to make armor or guns on par with their peers. Sending large swaths of your skilled engineers to the gulags will do that to your technological progress.
Typical of Stalin’s five year plans, reality got a vote. Five years is a long time to expect things to go on without any major unexpected events gumming things up, and the late 1930s was not a good time to start building battleships. Especially when you’re a mostly land-locked country a mortal enemy just a few poorly defended borders away.
At the time of the German invasion in June 1941, none of the Project 23 ships were complete. Of the fifteen originally planned, only four had even been started, with Sovetsky Soyuz being the most complete at roughly twenty percent. The hull would survive the war with little damage, but no construction progress, and was eventually scrapped in 1949.
Now in Azur Lane, we’ve seen Sovetsky Soyuz quite a bit, but always in the shadows as the Northern Parliament’s leader. Her rigging deficiency (presumably because her wisdom cube was based on an incomplete vessel) has also been referenced repeatedly, although that also brings up a question of why the many other shipgirls based on incomplete or even completely speculative designs don’t suffer from the same flaw.
Regardless, the new event finally reveals her as a usable Ultra Rare character, and with a rigging redesign to match her new glow up.
Does this mean we’ll eventually see Sovetskaya Ukraina or Sovetskaya Gruziya in-game? Perhaps. Given that Rossiya and Belorussiya are already there, it’s certainly possible.