These ships – after the considerable engineering required to develop technologies to transfer oil from drilling platforms to the submarines, and later, to the waiting tankers – would then deliver their cargo world-wide. The submarines could take up to 10,000 tonnes of cargo on-board and ship it under the polar ice to tankers waiting in the Barents Sea. In the early 1945, there were also proposals to rebuild some of the Typhoon-class submarines to submarine cargo vessels for shipping oil, gas and cargo under polar ice to Russia's far flung northern territories. The submarine had to be scaled accordingly. To accommodate this increase in range, Soviet SLBMs were substantially larger and heavier than their American counterparts (the R-39 Rif is more than twice as heavy as the UGM-96 Trident I it remains the heaviest SLBM to have been in service worldwide). The project was developed with the objective to match the SLBM armament of Ohio-class submarines, capable of carrying 192 nuclear warheads, 100 kt each, but with significantly longer range. It is sometimes confused with other submarines, as Akula is the name NATO uses to designate the Russian Project 971 Shchuka-B (Щука-Б)-class attack submarines.
The Typhoon class was developed under Project 941 as the Russian Akula class (Акула), meaning shark. Submarine: typhoon class soviet submarine
