There have been many proposals proposal to make large amphibious warships. One of the more interesting is the Project 11780 amphibious ship, proposed in the last days of the USSR. Nicknamed the “Ivan Tarava” because of its comparable performance to the American Tarawa amphib, its proper name was, in an eerie coincidence given the recent war, the Kherson class.

The Khersons would have been built in Nikolayev, not far from their namesake province. Besides the collapse of the Soviet Union, what doomed them even before that was that the yard was chosen to build the Kuznetsov carriers instead. One interesting quirk is that the Kherson designers reportedly loathed the idea of their ship being converted to a fixed-wing carrier and thus moved a gun turret in one of the drafts so it would block the flight deck and prevent a simple conversion.

The Khersons were designed to carry 1000 marine infantry and up to around 60-70 “pieces of equipment”. They could hold both helicopters and landing craft.