The Vintage Beauty of Soviet Control Rooms (2018)

and Lithuania was part of the Soviet Union.

Pretty much every country has it. Khrushchev implemented their mass deployment in the Soviet Union to stem a housing crisis (I think maybe even as one of his earliest actions as chairman...it's been a while since I read about it in an architecture magazine). Once you recognize the form, you see it everywhere, even outside the Soviet bloc; in the US, Canada, etc. The political influence makes their prominence within the urban fabric rise or fall, but the idea behind the building form is pretty much the same: cheap housing for an increasingly urban population without regard to street life, scale, etc., very much in the vein of Corbusier's Cité radieuse. I suspect the economic argument of that kind of construction was hard to argue with at the time.

You can find these types of construction even in some places in Western Europe (France for instance), only to a lower extent.

Back when they were first constructed people wanted to live in them: http://cartespostalesmoches.free.fr/cpm/images/95-Sarcelles-... https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-9uRJvieheZU/XrzoXnoH72I/AAAAAAAAw... https://www.letelegramme.fr/images/2017/05/09/cartes-postale...

You had all the modern comfort at a reasonable price.

Of course most of these buildings aged terribly and now they're mostly inhabited by very poor people. Now you see these decrepit, often crime-ridden "cités" and you wonder why anybody ever thought that was a good idea.

Hah, great, I posted a similar comment.

They don't necessarily get uglier, as many are insulated/painted/renovated/etc. and become quite presentable, especially if they become a bit more individualized.

But one thing that is noticeable that blocks built earlier (50s/60s) are usually better than those built later (70s/80s). Better quality material, more thought to living spaces around them, playgrounds, etc.

It was apparently customary to watch it on New Year's, sort of like Christmas movies in the West (according to my Russian teacher anyway.)

Better to cajole than to coerce. :)

Somehow, I feel like a short inclusion in "The Hunt For Red October" would have been nice. Pointless to the story, of course, but it would have contributed to the sense of grandeur, impressiveness, and "serious business" of the submarine as a machine.

Cool. Was the ship rocking, and the pool water stationary? Or Vice versa?

Sort of like how my brother built a pool in his dorm room out of plywood and tarps.

On the second floor.

Maintenance was not amused.

Seen that, yeah. Alas it has an obvious flair of a ‘photoshop design’ with no connection to any engineering work.

The ortholinear keyboard would be notable, if again it had any basis in reality aside from the ‘йцукенг’ Cyrillic layout—which however has punctuation cast away beyond reach.

Touchscreens are just evil in any sort of physically involved environment, e.g. a car or even a kitchen stove. You can have ‘good-looking and functional’ (with physical controls too), but touchscreens in such a setup are rather ‘good-looking and dysfunctional’.

Game controllers are the perfect example of ergonomically-tuned physical controls with sleek looks. And afaik the US military uses Xbox controllers in drone control or something like that.

I recall that there were some pretty long threads here after the US warship hitting some commercial vessel. The big issue wasn't using a screen but that the designers had taken advantage of having screens to create a multi-functional interface so one station could serve different functions, or functions could be moved between stations. Flexible, but confusing. I think the move is not to analog control, but back to single-purpose controls. Also, even if mechanical controls replace touchscreens, I'm sure that there will still be an optical encoder and field bus behind everything.

I think of it this way: tactile controls for operation, read-only screens for situational awareness, touch or keyboard/mouse for configuration. Just don't put them on real-time critical paths.

I don't think there's any such thing as "no design" (though I understand you to mean the academic subject).

All design evokes something. Colours, font, margin and spacing, edges and borders - it all evokes some things that came before it more than others, and the relationship with the human body and its feeling of agoraphobia and claustrophobia, kinematics - whether controls are pointy or smooth, hard or soft, stiff or slick or springy, continuous or with detents - it all adds up to an aesthetic.

You can't help but have design. You know when things don't "feel" right. When something feels flimsy instead of solid; when it's haphazard instead of regular. And when the design is exceptionally poor, chaotic, that too is a design - a kind of mad, insane design, or primitive and naive, unskilled - it always evokes something.

> the looks were just a part of the entire process to get a working product

Well, that would be enough for ‘industrial design’ as a discipline—the question is whether ‘the product does not cause suffering from looking at it and touching it’ was considered a part of the criteria for ‘working’.

This is not true. There was a whole institute doing industrial design: the Soviet Scientific Research Institute of Industrial Aesthetics [1]. That institute was also publishing a monthly "Technical Aesthetics" magazine from 1964 to 1992.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VNIITE

>There was no design,as a subject, in Soviet Union

Plainly false [1]{RUS}.

Reminds me of the infamous "There is no sex in the USSR!" blurb[2].

[1]https://profiok.com/news/detail.php?ID=5516

[2]https://russiapedia.rt.com/on-this-day/july-17/

Can you provide any recommendations or links?

Those prices say one thing: you better be serious.

Going with a US outfitter is the most efficient option, but is also expensive. A poor student with little money and a lot of time could try joining a research team as an unpaid helper. It has been years since I toyed with the idea, but when I did there were university groups of all sorts, from military-funded data collectors to environmentalists. University teams are often interested in saving limited grant money by paying fewer workers. This is a lot less glamorous option and one would need to do some work, but the ticket becomes free.

This is also another option, including the antarctic.

https://www.heritage-expeditions.com/

What you’re saying is that there was a deliberate mechanism by which a single man could turn both keys and trigger a launch? That’s WarGames-level horrifying.

Incidentally I’ve always deeply respected Soviet officers for being very level-headed in situations that should have precipitated a ‘retaliatory’ launch, such as during the Cuban missile crisis and when one of their satellites mistook glints off lakes for the IR sigantures of a first strike launch.

> hold the end of the standard, and give it a pull, which would turn the “out of reach” key as you turned yours. It was “officially unofficially official” in his (translated) words, to be done in the case of the incapacitation of the other launch control officer.

This is a reason why USSR never adopted a end-to-end PAL like US did. Union's PAL system only worked on the command chain level, and the remote launch command was only one of multiple options.

They feared that the US may attack the PAL link component, and it will prevent the launch. The same reason lead to mobile launchers being made one man operable, though even colonel level officers had little knowledge of the system operation besides "press buttons like on this picture if given code word blah-blah"

It is good that now we have Ukrainian launch officers that can divulge information on Soviet launch tech. The part of strategic rocket forces that stayed in Russia managed to keep secrecy perfect for 30 years.

I’ve toured the Savannah. It’s docked at Baltimore, MD, and they do tours one a year (but not this year). And yeah, the control rooms are very retro.

That part of the world is not exactly known for earthquakes.

Not waiting to happen- Wasn’t there a US Navy ship that collided recently because the throttles were done in software?

cf. BMW's dumb iDrive system

edit: and now that I think about it, I'm suddenly interested in understanding why consumer products seem averse to providing detailed/specific buttons compared to professional products? Is it to try to not overwhelm the casual / amateur user? (or conversely to be able to reach that user)

For example, professional video cameras that have physical buttons and dials for every function, versus consumer cameras that hide that 3 layers deep in a virtual menu.

Or, the cockpit of a jet (and all its displays and controls) versus a passenger car. Or how about a long-distance truck console -- is it similar?

Maybe it's the issue of casual / lowest common demoninator users not being overwhelmed by such detail. Or that if you cannot filter your users to the ones who can or want to handle the detail, you have to design to the lowest bar.

Which is a shame for those who want / like the detail.

Your car is now built and labeled with an international audience in mind and is no longer USA centric.

I don't want that at all.

I like to have relative temperature much more. Makes the transitions between inside and outside a lot more bearable, and is cheaper.

Air conditioning has more to do with controlling humidity than temperature. Besides, cars are highly-variable environments, and a thermostat setting is a poor indicator of a person's comfort. Maybe the sun is shining on me and I want cold, dry air blowing on me, even though the cabin temperature technically matches the seemingly-reasonable thermostat setting. Maybe a window is open, and blasting the AC is pointless. Maybe I'm driving past a stinky chicken farm and I want to turn on recirculate mode so I don't gag.

I don't care about a specific temperature setting, all I care about is relative comfort. A little warmer or colder by tweaking the temperature dial, dryer with the AC button, maybe a nice 80/20 split between my face and my feet—manual controls can do that, and going from my older car to newer thermostatically-controlled ones is always a frustrating experience because there's a disconnect between the input method and the desired output that makes this more difficult. Ironically, these systems usually have too many buttons, and that's largely why they're hard to use. Just give me three dials (temp, fan speed, blender) and two buttons (AC, recirculate).

Also, air conditioners are power-hungry and significantly affect fuel economy (and power output in ICE-driven cars). I don't turn it on unless I need it.

"Bike locks" is click-bait style misleading that BBC has adopted more and more.

Tubular tumbler locks.

I first saw them on computer cases in the 80s. They became popular (UK) on bike locks in the 90s as they were perceived as relatively secure. Then there was a famous hack where you could use a biro tube to open them - that would be around the time the BBC page says they stopped using those locks for nukes.

The same locks were used on filling cabinets and such.

You needed, we thought, a special tool to pick locks of this sort, until the "biro hack" came out (though I was young and didn't know about locks then).

Indeed. Had a little surgery under general anesthesia a while ago. Shortly before that time Hewlett-Packard ran adverts in the mainstream press about Windows on Itanium, with that hospital as flagship case.

Was my 2nd general anesthesia only, so i've been a little nervous because i don't like to be 'switched off'.

Anyways, been in the preparation room on that rolling stretcher thing, got some IVs and electrodes while looking around.

All very modern, many, many flat panel displays mounted on swivel arms from down the ceiling, showing and beeping my vital signs. Interesting for biofeedback, i thought.

Got the mask on, got asked how i feel: 'pleasantly light'.

Then all the beeping died, and all the screens froze. No reset, bluescreen, static or other unusual stuff. Just frozen.

Heard a loud 'SHIT!' from behind, and the clacking of running shoes on the tiles. Clacking shoes came back in an instant and rewired me to some shoebox-thing covered in orange rubber with some mini-displays, knobs and sliders.

'How do you feel now?' i've been asked... Lifting the mask i only growled: 'very confidence inspiring...'

'Sleep deep sweety!' was the last thing i heard.

Afterwards i had a surreal night at the 20ieth floor or so, with hot and cold shivers running up and down my spine and the harbour in my view.

Anyways, next morning i asked the surgeon if i hallucinated that, and she answered: No, you didn't. But it was a first!

I LOLd hard.

edit: It had to happen this way/to me, because all my life i've been an open-source fanboi.

Incompatible 'fates', so to speak :-)

There's a functional mechanical switching relay, the kind triggered off of the clicks of a rotary dialing wheel, attached to two phones at the communication museum in Frankfurt https://www.mfk-frankfurt.de/ and you can dial one phone from the other, and see the relays move as you enter the numbers.

Sabotage is probably the correct term.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_intervention_in_...

It was used to successfully navigate strikes, and the general idea was more decentralized than typical system these days.

Nixon also asked the CIA to "make the economy scream". It's really unfortunate that most experiment in central planning were also complicated by the world's super power at the time trying to ensure that the experiment failed. Not to mention that their key export (copper) price crashed during those years.

Not to say that there wouldn't have been bad economic outcomes here otherwise, but it's clear that they were going up against the CIA.

It's not unreasonable to hypothesize that a certain level of technology could make one work.

Cybersyn being strangled in the crib by the CIA isn't really good evidence in either direction.

Capitalism never stops working.

Can you expand on that, or give references/examples?

Spoiler alert - most corporations are centrally planned.

In fact, the system design behind Cybersyn is closer to decentralized systems like Toyota Production System rather than centralized approaches exemplified in typical American corporations.

The whole point of cybersyn was that control loops were supposed t be established at multiple levels from bottom up, with higher levels interacting only when required for example to handle cooperation between multiple entities.

The problem Amazon is solving also involves a lot of data, that is true.

But it has lots and lots of price information to go on, both prices people are willing to pay for various goods at various times & places, and prices at which suppliers stop selling. That's what command economies didn't have, and it's why they didn't work. That was the criticism.

Nope, unfortunately I don’t (yet), although I know the Cyrillic alphabet from living in Belgrade for awhile, and I speak some Polish and Serbo-Croatian. I’d say learning Russian is easier than it seems, especially if you’re from a technical background and are comfortable with complex grammar structures. Probably on par with Latin in terms of difficulty.

Here's a simple one [1] I had some fun with. (There's a Flash version too [2]).

That one's just a game, so I have no idea how accurate it is. But if you search you might find something that's used in some university's nuclear engineering program or something like that.

Very realistic ones used for actual training exist - this one [3] uses VR! - but those probably won't be online.

[1] http://www.ae4rv.com/store/nuke_pc.htm

[2] http://esa21.kennesaw.edu/activities/nukeenergy/nuke.htm

[3] https://www.hitachi-hgne.co.jp/en/business/examination/simul...