Kingfisher sub launched shipkiller

[maxmwill]

A bunch of years past, I read a technothriller in which the Soviet Union was beginning a war with the US. One of the weapons deployed was dubbed Vintokryl, author translating this to Kingfisher. This wás a sub launched missile that would leave the water, detect a ship( in the novel it was a US aircraft carrier), dive for the water from the high point of an arc, dive deep, then position itself under the ship and a rocket motor fired, missile hitting the keel or close to it and breaking the ship in have via kinetic force.
The author may have been Tom Clancy while he was still alive and not a zombified writer.
Does anything like that actually exist, if only in experimental form?

 

[Dilandu]

This wás a sub launched missile that would leave the water, detect a ship( in the novel it was a US aircraft carrier), dive for the water from the high point of an arc, dive deep, then position itself under the ship and a rocket motor fired, missile hitting the keel or close to it and breaking the ship in have via kinetic force.

Well, it seems that author mixed two real Soviet weapons:

* "Vodopad" anti-submarine missiles - which are launched from torpedo tube (of sufrace ship or submarine), then, in water, they ignite solid-fuel rocket engine, exit the water, and fly to the target at supersonic ballistic trajectory. Near target area, missile detach the warhead (either acoustic torpedo or nuclear depth charge), which dive into water and start to seek target.

* "Shyuka" anti-ship missile - the old, 1950s liquid rocket-powered anti-ship missile for early missile-carrying warships. It have a diving warhead - which means, that missile fell into water near target, warhead detached, and, due to special shape, moved through the water at upward-curved trajectory, and hit the enemy ship in the bottom (I suspect that this missile is based on American "Puffin" project, apparently appropriated by Soviet spies - the original specifications for "Shyuka" were almost entierly similar to the "Puffin" ones)

 

[JWilly]

(...) dive deep, then position itself under the ship and a rocket motor fired, missile hitting the keel or close to it and breaking the ship in have via kinetic force.

It is (relatively) easy to break a ship in half with a broad-application-area overpressure directly below it...for instance, a torpedo warhead or submerged mine.

It would, I think, be very difficult to break a ship in half using a point application of force from below. The total force required to lift the ship so as to cause it to structurally fail is the same, but the area over which that force would be applied would be several orders of magnitude smaller. I haven't run any numbers, but I'm pretty sure the required pressure at the point of contact to the hull for that much aggregate force would easily exceed the yield strength of the hull steel, and the impacting rocket-torpedo would just penetrate the hull.

Much more straightforward to have the in-water projectile (behaving like a torpedo, whatever it's called) locate the target, pass under it, and at the appropriate location, trigger a conventional-explosive warhead. The blast bubble would rise against the hull, applying a very large force over a broad area, followed rapidly by the secondary shock from the bubble collapse.