Photos from inside a Typhoon class submarine
ru-submarine.livejournal.com
ru-submarine.livejournal.com
https://www.mining.com/bbc-future-sr-71-blackbird-the-cold-w...
The thing is, Westerners will have a different view of what 'Public v. Private' means, and 'Open Enterprise' is something completely distinct from 'Government' which is not the case in other parts of the world - hence a lot of ideological confusion.
Grid fins weren't copied western tech, either. Nor was Sputnik.
You can read the parent article for more details. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buran_programme
A much better counterpoint would have been the Tu-4, which was in every detail a reverse-engineered B-29: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupolev_Tu-4
The Tu-160 and B-1 are another example of this.
It wasn't as reusable as the American counterpart, but if we did that with today's reusable boosters the way SpaceX does it, it wouldn't be that bad.
Remember, of course, what drove both designs was the capability to bring large objects back from space in a single orbit
It's really no surprise Buran was abandoned and the shuttle was bad at everything else (except looking good in pictures).
Another is that the engineers designing Buran were told to "make it look like US Shuttle" - only look, mind you, as outside of common shape the design is completely different.
One of the reasons I've seen for this order was to make a point to USA, though I do not remember the details. MiG designers were reportedly annoyed at the requirement, but still made it look like Shuttle - and be several times more capable than Shuttle.
In 1957, only forty years later, and after suffering the revolution, the First and Second World War, Russia won an important steep in the space race.
Granted, those were very hard times for the Russian people, but, still, credit where it's due.
It's like being a centralized economy really helps when you have to catch-up a competitor, and when the path to achieve that is very well understood. By contrast, market economies shine when innovation is the driver of growth.
Russia was more or less devastated, having lost more soldiers and civilians than everyone else except China combined. With Communism, they chose to maintain an adversarial stance towards the West, and they're still paying dearly for it today. The entire history of Russia seems to consist of smart people making one bad decision after another.
That "feudal society" had built the Trans-Siberian railway. While it certainly was lagging behind the Western Europe in industrialization, it was a solid second-tier country, like Japan or AH.
> In search of a way out of this difficult situation, the government made deliberate efforts that led to an unprecedented industrial boom that began in 1893. The years of this boom were a time of economic modernization of Russia under the auspices of the state.
+----------------+-----------+-----------+------+
| Сountry | 1881–1885 | 1896–1900 | 1913 |
+----------------+-----------+-----------+------+
| United States | 28.6 | 30.1 | 35.8 |
| United Kingdom | 26.6 | 19.5 | 14.0 |
| Germany | 13.9 | 16.6 | 15.7 |
| France | 8.6 | 7.1 | 6.4 |
| Russia | 3.4 | 5.0 | 5.3 |
+----------------+-----------+-----------+------+
> On the eve of the revolution, the country's national income was 16.4 billion rubles (7.4% of the world total). According to this indicator, the Russian Empire ranked fourth after the United States, Germany and the British Empire.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrialization_in_the_Russi...
Anyway, In 1917, it was the poorest country per capita of Europe except Portugal and suffered the revolution and the first and the second world war. I think is kind of surprising that, starting in that position, they could keep the pace in a race with the USA.
French First Republic too suffered from revolution yet two decades later it (First Empire) conquered much of the Europe. There was no other choice for USSR. All wealth flooded into militaristic complex. System could effectively produce weapon but it could not solve citizens needs.
In 1910 'Russian Empire' was 170 Million people, the US was 100 Million people. We're talking about 10x GDP per capita.
That would be like the US vs. Morocco today.
Today GDP per capita is $66K US vs. $12K Russia which is substantial.
Russia has, for a long time, hard 'fairly large, inefficient economic base'.
They have power mostly because of their size, and their 'acute' ability to produce things (they have very smart people), and of course their aggressive Imperial view of things.
Serfdom abolished in 1861, by 1917 forth country by GDP. Table I've cited shows increase of share in world production while shares of UK, Germany and France were decreasing. It occupied a leading position in world agriculture.
USSR reintroduced serfdom, peasants had no passports, they could not move into town without permissions [1]. USSR had famines in 1921–1923 and 1932–33, about ten of millions died. Total mismanagement. There was rebirth after Stalins death, if only they've introduced reforms like later in China.
Russia today is mostly resource-based economy [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passport_system_in_the_Soviet_...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Russia#/media/File:...
2) It doesn't matter that much if 'Russia version X' share of world economy was 'growing' for some range of a few decades if it's literally 1/10th the per capita economic power of those other nations. It's still a 'way behind'.
In fact, the 'further behind' the quicker growth should be. Most of the 'very poor' nations of the world today are growing very quickly.
'Russia Version X' has always been quite far behind, it's been that way for centuries, since the dawn of what we might even call 'Russia'.
That's exactly my point. Apply "per capita" to China several decades ago, it does not translate to its status today. It started with 1978 reform [1], per capita would eventually catch up.
> 'Russia Version X' has always been quite far behind ...
That's hand wavy, I can apply same rhetoric to Japan and some periods of China. In parallel universe USSR took required reforms and PRC didn't. Russian Empire had fourth GDP in the world, that's not Morocco, that's economy of Japan or Germany plus pool of cheap labor and natural resources.
And yes, Japan and China were 'way behind' as well in most of the modern era.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_and_Fall_of_the_Great....
> In 1917, Russia was one of the most backwards countries in Europe, practically a feudal agrarian society.
I've specifically mentioned 1893 and 1861 as starting point. It was industrial state by 1917. You have nothing to contradict it.
But the counterfactual isn't stasis. Russia of 1913 was busy on the same sort of government-driven upswing that Germany had ridden a few years earlier, there was lots of modernization going on and lots more planned. The soviet propaganda of course was very keen to downplay this, so they pushed "practically a feudal agrarian society" ideas hard.
At the same time as making Spitnik & submarines, and many many tractors, I think they also never equaled the 1913 harvest. At their peak, perhaps early 60s, they were still importing a lot of food from the prairies. In the 80s, without imports, the calculation was that they'd have been back to WWII levels of rationing.
You mention Germany. The Bismark government (hardly a communist government) created the first social security program, probably because they were afraid of what could happen if they don't.
And the people eating the 1913 harvest didn't start a revolution. The empire fell apart after years of war (as did the Austrians, and the Turks) and then many factions duked it out. And then reconquered all the hungry people who hoped they'd seen the last of guys from Moscow, with guns.
I don't think it's so simple. We have to account for the revolution in 1905. The Wikipedia article is a good one (1) and I think it shows the zeitgeist. In my view is the pressure of the system in the peasants and in the proletariat what creates the conditions for 1917, even if the wars were the trigger.
For example, building of metro in Kyiv was planned to start in 1918.
I'd be skeptical that price controls had a larger affect on the distribution of information than censorship and the threat of imprisonment in the gulag.
Consider that talking about a superior suspension system present in Western cars would have been problematic to the censors. Engineers who pushed such systems could find themselves in trouble, and ultimately cozy insiders could get competitors blackballed for pushing competing programs e.g. Censorship and Corruption did the most damage to the efficient allocation of capital.
For example, if a supplier is inefficient in a free market, then the prices they charge are significantly higher than the inputs - i.e. profit is high. High profits attract competition; competitors look at the price of the output and the prices of the input and see that they can do better by building something cheaper. This competition drives efficiency and reduces prices.
Whether competition is banned, or improvements are banned, or prices are exogenously set, it's all approximately equivalent to mucking with price as information.
The oppression was in order to control the economy and the support and confidence was lost because in part because of their inability to provide basic goods and services in a command economy.
> I'd be skeptical that price controls had a larger affect on the distribution of information than censorship and the threat of imprisonment in the gulag.
Its not about the size of the effect but about the effect on specific information that is needed for capital allocation.
USSR was outcompeted by market-driven economies and collapsed due to the unsustainability of the system.
Oil prices is a distraction from the issue because if the USSR had been able to sell petroleum at a premium then they would have been able to purchase raw materials and finished products from market economies elsewhere and perhaps sustained the system for longer but it doesn't explain why they were reliant on an extraction industry and market-produced goods.
The US started a huge build up of arms. eg missiles and destroyers specifically, but also the US had significant advances with tank and aircraft weaponry.
The US consumerist system had a positive feedback into the US industrial military complex where advances in manufacturing and information technology lead to huge efficiency gains for arms production even though Western arms production supply chains almost completely isolated.
So, the US had a massive technology and manufacturing advantage, then the US tanked world oil prices and other commodities that the USSR required from world markets. Significantly the USSR was buying more grain and food from the world market, so while the USSR was able to keep up with technology, it was not able to keep up with efficiency gains that the US was realising.
Corruption was also a huge problem for the USSR, and it still is to this day in Russia.
The Americans bankrupted the USSR on multiple fronts. Capital allocation is a capitalist system notion, but, more generally, the US was able to allocate deploy its available resources in a way that out-competed the USSR. The USA was able to organise its society and economy in a more efficient and productive way than the USSR, and that is a Macro Economic argument.
Until the 80's the USA had second most equitable distribution of wealth next to the USSR. The USA imposed significant taxes on everybody up to a marginal rate of 80%. If you want to "Make America Great Again", you need to restore taxation to the levels seen between 1945 and 1981; maybe even to the end of the 80's. American government funding through the DARPA project lead to numerous technological advances that most people, worldwide, now depend upon.
Not really, more like a “capitalist” p.o.v. but not in the pejorative context or the crony corporatist context that it holds today; my view is that prices are the mechanism by which information is shared by all participants in a market and that profit (from uncoerced transactions) is the wage for correctly allocating capital. This process occurs regardless of state intervention but it is distorted by state intervention, which is why authoritarians seek to mandate that profit be taken from people in order to fund their failing projects. Left unchecked this process strangles the productive machinery of society because the unproductive coercively funded portion captures more and more of the value in society and continues to squander it on their own values that are not viable in a free and open society. If this process is restrained then the market can drive growth and the parasitic aspect grows with it because of the continued increase in surplus value generated by the market and the fact that the parasitic coercive aspect can simply claim more of the surplus value.
You mention advantages that the US had but that doesn’t explain why the USSR collapsed. Lots of places besides the US didn’t have all of those same advantages but they didn’t descend into the same type of failures that command economies did. And its not as though the USSR didn’t innovate technologically. They were just had less surplus value available to their parasitic endeavors because they had a command economy and that system is not able to coordinate the actions of millions of people to the degree that a market is.
> Corruption was also a huge problem for the USSR, and it still is to this day in Russia.
There may or may not be a cultural element to this but surely you agree that corruption is more of a problem when the corrupt entity has more power and control?
> The Americans bankrupted the USSR on multiple fronts. Capital allocation is a capitalist system notion, but, more generally, the US was able to allocate deploy its available resources in a way that out-competed the USSR. The USA was able to organise its society and economy in a more efficient and productive way than the USSR, and that is a Macro Economic argument.
Capitalists may have studied the way that markets allocate capital in more detail but the entire concept of communism is that the workers “should” control the capital assets they use at their profession. If it is true that they haven’t even considered how workers would choose what capital assets to build and maintain, which capital assets to leave idle for the time being, and which capital assets to abandon, disassemble, and reallocate, then that is an argument in my favor.
> Until the 80's the USA had second most equitable distribution of wealth next to the USSR. The USA imposed significant taxes on everybody up to a marginal rate of 80%. If you want to "Make America Great Again", you need to restore taxation to the levels seen between 1945 and 1981; maybe even to the end of the 80's. American government funding through the DARPA project lead to numerous technological advances that most people, worldwide, now depend upon.
This is an ideological issue and beyond the scope of our discussion about prices, command economies, and capital assets.
I don’t think you’re understanding what information is being talked about here. If you don’t let a market of buyers and sellers determine the price of something you can’t discover the supply and demand curves nor the price floor, etc.
If the government comes out and just dictates that the price for gas is capped at $2/gal, you just end up with a bunch of shortages, rations, and lost potential oil industries because a ton of market information has bene destroyed. That is entirely independent of censorship.
Then when post-WW2 the expected disarmament didn't come... well
The point here is that soviet economic collapse as a historical event preceded the shock privatization* despite what command economy apologists might claim.
*free market proponents shouldn’t defend the sale of state assets to oligarchs when those assets were formerly expropriated. The title is encumbered by the previous misdeeds.
I think there is also no dispute that the wave of privatizations that followed the end of USSR led to an even economically worse situation for the Russian state. The fact that said privatizations were merely a transfer of State assets to a small group of private individuals for pennies on the dollar is a signifiant factor of that.
What's less clear to me is why privatization was the chosen direction instead of a more dirigist approach, and I posit that the reason is the prevailing dogma back then (as promoted by such institutions as the IMF or the World Bank) was that democracy equals free market economy equals prosperity, so the Soviet people naturally believed democracy would be the solution to their economic problems. Had they been aware of an alternative way to prosperity (aka the Chinese way), I don't know if they would have adopted democracy (or what passed for democracy in Eltsine and Putin's Russia) or free market economy.
I'm not sure how to parse this. Certainly I can agree that there is something morally wrong about the process of expropriating assets, mismanaging them, and then transferring them to politically connected people. However the economy now meets the needs of the people better than it did when it was state-owned, and the Russian state is made of people, it has no interests apart from the people who constitute it. If you're presenting a command economy that can't feed its people and a crony economy that does a better job feeding people, I think most people would choose the option where they get fed.
> What's less clear to me is why privatization was the chosen direction instead of a more dirigist approach, and I posit that the reason is the prevailing dogma back then (as promoted by such institutions as the IMF or the World Bank) was that democracy equals free market economy equals prosperity, so the Soviet people naturally believed democracy would be the solution to their economic problems.
I doubt the people had much say in the matter either way.
The argument is that what the USSR experienced is an accelerated version of what we're seeing in the US, since it didn't have the other social institutions to make the transition. The free market didn't win, it just paused its ambitions to cannibalize the only competition before continuing on the same destructive path that the USSR economy speed ran in the 80s.
this doesn't exactly make sense when the people you call semi-incompetent were unable to meet basic standards of the modern world with their dictatorial powers and the crony economy that replaced them was able to rebuild the capital assets and replace them.
> they lost everything that made them competitive.
they were not competitive at the time according to practically everyone.
> most of the privatized industry that remains is largely rent seeking (telecom et all), resource extraction, and the military industrial complex.
why was a command economy unable to make extractive and rent-seeking enterprises work? why was a market economy able to sustain a military industrial complex (which is wholly parasitical) when a command economy was not?
> The argument is that what the USSR experienced is an accelerated version of what we're seeing in the US,
this is because the US is a mixed economy, not a market economy. the same process of parasitic institutions strangling the productive institutions is at play, it only takes longer because there are more productive institutions and fewer parasitic institutions in a mixed system than a command system.
> The free market didn't win, it just paused its ambitions to cannibalize the only competition before continuing on the same destructive path that the USSR economy speed ran in the 80s.
of course the free market didn't win because there was no free market competing. the mixed economy outcompeted the command economy because the market portion produced more value and the command economy choked on its own inability to effectively allocate capital. It is true that people who had the money came from market institutions and purchased formerly public assets in the former USSR. This suggests the question: Why were they able to purchase these assets and why didn't representatives of the command economy purchase the (private) capital assets in the west?
Mises didn't say a planned economy could produce nothing, but that it would lead to irrational and inefficient use of resources.
USSR military and overall production and eventual collapse demonstrates his argument pretty well.
You can also see that US military spending is another example of irrational and inefficient use of resources allowed by central planning rather than market forces.
It is similar to the legend that says the Germans supplied the red ink for the bright army pants of French soldiers on the field in 1914 « for a good price » (you bet!), although I think this one is rather a legend, as it is true that French costumes were too fancy for war, I think the traditional red pants were not in widespread application at the time.
I wonder if at some point there will be unified suppliers and supply chains for all armaments for all actors, acting entirely independently of any nation state. Corporations are more or less there in terms of their ability to hop jurisdictions and work around international law.
In fact, maybe we do already have this, but it’s non-obvious.
The US and the Soviet were never at war though.
But no, there was never declaration of war and direct hostilities.
This seems to be an example of defense strategy driving economics. In the US we tend to think of market forces driving defense policy but in fact there's a feedback loop between defense technology and how societies organize themselves.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/WarCollege/comments/9abbo3/what_wer...
Basically, SV was started by WW2 military radio / em / signal tech!
https://www.riksdagen.se/sv/dokument-lagar/dokument/statens-...
In some country I have seen reverse coding, i.e. increasing number dialled gave decreasing number of pulses. Maybe Norway???
Big endian vs. little endian is not something new that came with digital computers :)
Edit: Only Oslo (different from the rest of Norway) and New Zealand had the inverted coding.
If the phone was for connecting the sub to landlines, sure, otherwise, who knows?
Soviet, western (metric) and western (wtf).
Is this a Metric vs US Customary thing? How does that relate to supply chains?
To this day, surplus FALs are either “inch” or “metric” pattern.
You could interchange inch and metric lowers as complete units, but not the parts within.
There were separate NATO Stock Numbers for the various parts.
The dig at the inch standard is pointless because the NATO supply chain supports both.
Three different systems, three different manufacturing philosophies.
- Germany - pre-industrial artisan manufacture (250 modifications during 2-year production run of 1347 units, 300 thousand man-hours per tank vs American 10 thousand man-hours)
- USA - Detroit style horizontal mass production (US scaled down tanks production in 1944 due to overproduction in 1943)
- Soviet Union - cost-optimized, vertical mass production (the average tank lasted only 14 hours in battle anyway)
https://youtu.be/N6xLMUifbxQ?t=2875
Tank Production: A Comparative Study of output in Germany, the US, and the USSR Jonathan Parshall.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rG3PiVm9DvQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQMjPzXLC5k
You can still get Soviet germanium transistors since they were in use a few decades longer than in the west- handy for repair of old electronics.
Things that happened in cars in the eighties: electronic ignition (no distributor), fuel injection (no carburetor), full body zinc coating (much less rust).
My second assignment was to write programs that processed data from a towed sonar array. We were looking for ways to find Typhoon submarines hiding in underwater canyons.
It is funny to me now to see a Typhoon mothballed with tourists crawling all over it. We were honestly scared of this thing.
Mark 46 has 50kg of explosives. Not as much as heavy torpedo, but still no submarine in the world will likely be able to continue a mission with damage from it, invariably of whether it had double hull or not. Though, a typhoon would've more likely it simply outran, and outdived it.
"The Soviet Navy would have to “treat and/or derust each Typhoon’s massive steel outer hull and Titanium inner hulls. Russia may have lost the highly expensive industrial capability to work Titanium for submarines.”" - https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/why-russia-packing-it...
The lab was always working on ways to counter a threat. I was just a junior engineer on one team. The Navy has a lot of money.
Whilst it's not likely that the mission could continue with damage from a Mark 46 (44 KG explosive, btw), it's very likely that the titanium would at least give the submarine a much greater chance of survival than otherwise, as evidenced by the USS Baton Rouge collision in February 1992 with a Sierra-class sub, which suffered much less damage than the American one.
Entire generations of the best an brightest roped in to build political brinkmanship tools, never to be used that are now rusting away.
Meanwhile, Japan and Germany, the loosers of WW2 that was meant to be kept down, by not allowing them to participate in the arms race built up formidable industrial capacity, that came to dominate many sectors by the end of the cold war.
Look at Taiwan today. What other option do they have other than burning billions to buy some deterrence?
Same goes for Japan and Germany. They are highly dependent on outside help if the bullies in the neighborhood get a little more ambitious.
US paid 22% of NATO’s military and civilian budget [0]. No other developed country spends 3+% on fighter jets, drones etc. It’s just a waste of ressources and does not bring any peace and protection to the world.
Russia invades Germany: yeah, I’d rather learn Russian than become the nuclear playground for the US and Russia. The world stage has seen enough examples. Like WHY exactly would Russia or China start a war with anybody? Nukes would end the world as we know it. Don’t need 100, just a handful.
So that's why just having the nukes isn't enough. They're mostly just there so that the US/allies don't get nuked, not good for much else (but very good for that).
“We know that over 182,000 civilians have died from direct war related violence caused by the US, its allies, the Iraqi military and police, and opposition forces from the time of the invasion through November 2018.” [0]
[0] https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/costs/human/civilians/ir....
Again, the general idea of both nuclear and non-nuclear brinkmanship is to avoid WWIII or anything close to it. Starting and participating in relatively small wars[1] does not change that calculus.
[1] I say small because WWII killed 85,000,000 in 6 years. The goal is to avoid that (or worse), not to avoid all death by war period.
Nobody * has reason to start random wars abroad and people are not excited spending billions of dollars on weapons to nuke innocent civilians.
Just assume that people you don’t know (abroad or not) are guys like you - having no interest in nuking or bombing others or starting wars; but they are generally worried about their families and mortgages.
Wars are fabricated by a small group of people in power that gain from buying and selling death. Wars are inherently inefficient and a waste of resources.
Edit: * Well, I guess Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Laos, Libya, Syria and many others would disagree....
When I say China is pushing the envelope, I'm talking about their actions in Hong Kong, the South China Sea, Taiwan, and more.
When I say Russia is pushing the envelope, I'm talking about Georgia, Ukraine, Syria, etc.
You're making a bunch of points that I don't disagree with (average people don't want war / war is not economically productive), followed by a single point which undermines the rest of your thesis ("small group of people in power"). It doesn't matter what Average Joe Russia does/wants if the people that actually have power in Russia are doing something else. Ditto for China. Nobody is claiming that all Chinese people are rabid expansionists, just that the people who matter are.
Both China and Russia have clearly demonstrated that they want to expand their real power / strengthen it in places where they already have soft power. If the US wasn't around to stick navies in contested waters, wag its finger, flex its muscles, and impose sanctions, most people think the world would not be as peaceful as it is. As you've pointed out, this still isn't as peaceful as it could be, and that's something to be worked on. But that doesn't change the fact that it could also be much, much worse.
Best peace ever. Situation would be worse. Much worse. Has been much much worse before.
What makes you believe that we, the West, are the “good” guys? Haven’t we killed more innocent civilians than “the evil East” in recent decades?
Then American developed the bomb and started playing world police and we haven’t had one since.
Nobody said “evil East” except you.
I didn’t say America are the good guys. Just that I think America’s actions have prevented WWIII or anything close.
It cost every working American 42,000 USD. These wars cost the lives of almost 1 mio people and 21 mio were displaced. [0]
Do you honestly believe this was for the good of the world and necessary to prevent WWIII? I am not even suggesting something like “why don’t you spend all that budget on a better health care system, free education and racial equality” because I know that would just push blood pressure. But I know that you won’t worry so much about these insane spendings - because your children and grand-children will have to pay back all the debt these irresponsible arguments accumulated. So smart your generation has been!
WWII was a consequence of WWI. Germans are pretty chill these days and complain about increasing military budgets. So who should ever want to start WWIII???
And just for the sake of completing an argument: you do know, that Europe is now taking financial responsibility and giving shelter to those people in the Middle East whose livelihoods were destroyed, right? The refugee crisis is not “a natural occurrence”. Europe learned its lesson and prefers spending money on helping others rather than showcasing military strength and gadgets.
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/20/us-spent-6point4-trillion-on...
You're attacking a strawman here.
I’m at a loss here. I keep hearing you say that others push the envelope and the US constantly prevents WWIII... But then again - they are the only ones constantly at war and nobody knows why.
Russia invaded Georgia in 2008[0]. Russia has taken over Crimea, a part of Ukraine in 2014[1]. Sweden plans to increase their military spending because of Russia's actions[2]. Estonia is upping its sea defenses[3].
I'm sure that the majority of Russians would prefer not to go to war. They have their own problems - a drug epidemic, a demographic implosion, and a quickly declining economy. Then there are the oligarchs. But, given the right carrot and stick (mostly stick), I see no reason why they wouldn't invade a neighboring country. Because, the small group of people you mention, those gangsters at the top, they have a lot of big sticks to motivate people to sign up for the army and do terrible things to their neighbors.
FYI, I've lived half of my life in Europe. Eastern Europe. The threat of Russia is always present in the back of people's heads. And they like NATO safety. No, they wouldn't prefer to welcome Russia and learn Russian. They like their life, they like their cultures, and yes, they are even so barbaric as to want to defend their life and culture with their lives by standing up to Russia.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russo-Georgian_War [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annexation_of_Crimea_by_the_Ru... [2]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidnikel/2020/10/16/sweden-to... [3]: https://www.defensenews.com/global/europe/2020/10/01/estonia...
But look at the innovation that comes from both endeavors and leaks out into the rest of society. Arguably computer technology would not be where it is without the war machine driving the initial innovation.
And similarly, web technology, such as Javascript and just the ability to update a webpage without reloading it wouldn't exist without ad-tech.
I've lost track, which is A now? Only Facebook and Google are adtech, Apple wants to sell hardware and Amazon wants to do retail, adtech/surveillance capitalism could be banned tomorrow and both the A's would not skip a beat.
But those technologies are now used pretty widely across the whole tech industry, including in the hard sciences.
"the streaming video tech" integrated the player into the browser to control it and show ads. not much gained imo.
Compare Mapquest vs Google Maps to know why Javascript is important
If you don't know what Mapquest was, there's your answer
So you can tell me that Javascript is important, and I won't argue that, but it's like nuclear power. It can be used for good or evil. And you don't want to get any on you. (With apologies to Dilbert.) It seems like Brendan Eich is a nice guy, but if he knew how people would use JS to make the average top-100 site today -- and make page loads take several seconds over a gigabit ethernet connection on one of the world's fastest laptops -- would he do it all over again?
Google maps was better than Mapquest when Google first put theirs on line, and better than either one is any more.
Google has simply declined below the baseline by failing to be as useful as they once were.
Mapquest remains more performant if less popular by comparison.
A reasonable explanation is that Google engineers & business operators are not as advanced as they were 20 years ago, likely not as dissimilar to average employees elsewhere any more.
This kind of thing is more common than you think.
From what I understand of the 21st century hiring process that is expected.
Also you say no ad-tech would mean a world without JavaScript like it’s a bad thing.
Inertial confinement drove development of short-pulse lasers, which are good for research into chemical reaction dynamics.
Some time ago, someone here posted about running the infrastructure for one of the main pr0n sites, and it was crazy cool.
It wasn't "cutting edge," but it was incredibly well-engineered and robust.
This might be it (not sure): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23976449
I suspect we'd have made decades of progress if we'd truly dumped all the funds spent on military efforts in the 20th century into research.
Not to mention the lost opportunity cost of making millions of people have the occupation of soldier, rather than something more productive.
You can always create a civilian training program with the same sort of structure as a military program if that's worthwhile.
But generally people don't seem to view it as the most effective form of education. The time spent on any military discipline or studies is time taken away from some other subject.
That's its job.
Excess preparation for war is resource distribution, with variable effects on perceived prosperity.
Stockpiling guns & ammo costs many people a lot but others make their money this way.
Not as much as actually deploying or fully waging a war though.
With military discipline and strategy another problem comes when the myth is perpetuated about this being the strongest form of discipline and best approach to overcoming objectives in other challenging pursuits.
The complete faultiness of a military-style chain-of-command for non-military purposes is often overlooked simply because when such a visible chain is in place aboard something like a corporation, it is recognizable and familiar.
Too bad.
If you want to get the most out of your resources you're going to need a lot stronger and more effective discipline than the military, and a whole lot different style chain-of-command, from top to bottom.
Preparing for exponential growth requires a naturally different mindset compared to preparing for exponential mutual destruction.
I don't know what I find more depressing - that somebody thinks this is true, or worse, that somebody thinks this is a good thing.
But I think you'd be hard pressed to provide evidence that the web would be better without Javascript. Yes, people abuse javascript and make it do awful things, but think about all the good things Javascript enables.
On reddit, you can comment without reloading the page thanks to javascript.
There are ton of great games that are all in javascript.
Simple things like when you log into a webpage and it shows your username in the corner.
Status notification on webpages.
Being able to make a request and then continue working while the request processes.
Javascript is a tool, and I'd say it's a tool that makes things better overall.
If you comment on reddit, don't you watch the page to confirm your comment went up? So not necessarily a productivity gain through Javascript. Conscious reloading is nice as there is no distraction: You take an action to see new state like login, new messages and notifications. Again, totally subjective.
There were plenty of games made with Flash, so game dev tools were developed independent of ad-tech.
The modern versions of these use a lot more Javascript for countdown timers, and while that's nice the pages usually feel slower.
Market based economies and state sponsored science are pretty solid at bringing about progress and the trillions in military spending that could have reasonably been saved since WW2 would have have lifted all boats and would have provided money for better education, telescopes, particle accelerators and many other things we can't even conceptualize, since so many ressources were squandered.
And regarding ad-tech: similar thing. All that money that goes into it is paid for by us through the products we buy, plus we are manipulated by it so our decisions are all worse. Do away with it and we would have better things all around.
Culturally, humans are short term focused. It takes a big abstraction tied to real core needs to get us to do anything long term. God(s), the tribe, survival, basically sex and death.
Ad tech is about tomorrow. Surveillance+capitalism was our only long term bet of late, but I think we're pivoting to systematic mass disinformation.
Furthermore, military tech has a huge impact on everyday life (jet engines, satellites, communications). Even when the tech was not directly invented by the military, it was still at some time a major customer or patron of the tech.
If we learned anything post-WW II it is that you cannot win wars with technological superiority and they look like a huge waste of ressources. Vietnam, Afghanistan anyone?
I do understand that a lot of well paid people had us buy weapons we don’t need for decades; they did a good job in convincing our parents and their parents that evil is just about to make its move.
Just spend less money and have a compulsory military service. Young men without any military ambition from the very society they are supposed to protect are just very eager not doing anything and not shooting anybody up - until shit really hits the fan in their home country and they have to.
Some amount of each generation? Yes.
In general I agree with your sentiment. War = bad.
Being a pacific that eschews all ability to make war is not the pinnacle of evolution. At least not in my view of things. A truly evolved species will retain the power to protect innocent again harm and violence, but only use that horrible type of power expressly that purpose.
They have "effectors", which is highly advanced tractor beam-style technology that allows you to manipulate matter from a distance with a precise field, which can obviously be used for all sorts of scientific / constructive pursuits. But in times of war, the effectors can be used for all kinds of defensive/destructive shenanigans as well.
They also have gridfire, a weapon more potent than anti-matter.
Once again showing that The Culture is the coolest idea of a Utopia ever conceived.
It's unfortunate that humans can find the resources for war but can't find the resources to help fellow humans. But in some sense, the department of defense is a massive jobs program not just in the direct hires but also in the large military industrial complex of military contractors (and you see this in the way politicians work to keep military bases open and contracts for useless jets going) that, as long as we don't go to war, is arguably a net positive.
I wish we could admit how much of a jobs program it is and use that money and effort directly for good things.
The sad thing is that the Vulcan was one of three submission to The UK government to build a long range bomber. The military wanted the Vulcan, but it was seen as risky due to its advanced technology. So they orderd the Vulcan and the Victor, a less risky design as backup. Then they got cold feet and orderd the Valiant too just in case. So they ended up designing 3 entirely different planes with the same Mission profile. Oh, yes then they bought some B-29 Just in case....
The problem with this scenario is that it is unrealistic, just like assuming there is a way of having an absolutely peaceful world.
A planet with billions of agents each who are moderately self-interested will result in the agents trying to take things from each other by force. To protect themselves, the agents form groups and aggregate their resources, using them to produce war-making abilities that can deter other agents. 'Tis the way of the world.
The wonderful thing is how far we've come in making the world safer over the last 2000 years. In the west we have a largely functional police force and judiciary that will protect and provide justice to every citizen regardless of their political influence
As compared to 2000 years ago of course, as compared to some utopian ideal we have a long way to go, as recent news in the US shows :)
Worse, it’s even counterproductive. Investing in useful economic assets pays dividends thus increasing your long term military capacity. Buying excessive military hardware on the other hand just gets outdated over time. So, the winning strategy is to spend slightly less than your opposition.
IIRC in its heydays the British government had 'the rule of three': a policy of making sure the Royal Navy could take on the top 3 naval powers and still come out ahead. Something like that is what the US is going for today, and I'm not sure they're wrong.
Still, in that situation diplomacy is generally far more cost effective than military capacity. Also, wars between roughly equivalent militaries don’t end in an afternoon and generally favor defense over offense.
Anyway, remember the British Empire failed, as did the Spanish, French, etc. It’s simply not a long term winning strategy.
The scenario isn't based on a need to drop 25 nukes on every other country on earth but to be able to get back at anyone even in the case of a massive unwarned pre-emptive strike.
Same on the Russian side, they probably still also have many more warheads than they need to obliterate any chosen enemy.
Also, these systems takes decades to build, I don't think Putin and his leadership was/is particularly afraid of Bush, Obama or Trump planning a massive pre-emptive strike - or vice versa - these systems are probably in place because of presidents long dead and the risk of future presidents who still aren't more than bullies in elementary school.
If it was needed, you can also design a bunker to survive a direct strike and launch after the fact. Though subs in the Great Lakes would be most cost effective option for the US.
Remember US govt spends trillions on the military complex. All that money has to go somewhere.
Anyway, back to the point of spending just less than what your (main?) opponent do. Another big problem is that back in Cold War days, it is rather hard to work out your opponent’s exact military capability. US use this to their advantage by starting up Strategic Defence Initiative (aka Star Wars Programme) to bluff the Soviets to spend more of their crippling economic capability to their military, ultimately accelerated their collapse.
You develop a better delivery method, and it's easier to build another 1000 warheads than repurpose the first 1000. You end up with 2000.
It won't be long you will have to build more. As the warheads are not consumed, you end up having more and more. But only 1000 of the latest generation, that really counts.
Between 1940 and 1996, the U.S. government spent at least $9.49 trillion in present-day terms[5] on nuclear weapons, including platforms development (aircraft, rockets and facilities), command and control, maintenance, waste management and administrative costs. Saving ~8 trillion was very much a viable option. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapons_of_the_United_...
By comparison China built about 600 warheads since 1964 which was a significant deterrent for the US. The US on the other hand built ~70,000.
PS: The Minuteman-III was in service from 1970 to now, it’s scheduled to be retire in 2030. While bombers where replaced ICBM’s where hardly a quickly outdated weapon.
Then, when a better tech becomes an option, it doesn't replace the previous weapon, it complements it.
So the options are: 1) retire old weapons, recycle them to build weapons which are expected to be better, keep the military potential about the same, reduce costs but still spend a lot and 2) keep what's in service and build a better weapon. Option 1 is hard to justify politicaly. Scraping something perfectly functional that costs billions sounds like a career ending decision. It also affects too many people. Option 2 is almost a guaranteed way to improve military potential, and a way to have a stellar career. Assuming that funding is available.
So yes, the decisions are not always the most economically efficient. That's a wrong objective function. Especially if we're talking about defense.
Justifying it to the American taxpayer is meaningless when it’s hidden from them. But, justifying it to Congress was just a question of pork spending which is really what the excessive nuclear stockpile was. It’s no accident that all 3 major branches of the military had Nukes, though currently that’s down to Air Force and Navy.
Forget about MAD, that was an interim doctrine that faded out in the late 1960s.
Once delivery systems demonstrated sufficient accuracy to hit point targets the doctrine changed to counterforce.
For counterforce, targeting individual weapons and enablers, you need lots of lower-yield warheads. The total yield of the nuclear aresenals actually declined as a result.
At best it was a fig leaf enabling ~10 Trillion dollars in pork spending, but counterforce was hardly a useful military doctrine.
Bob: To keep the tigers away.
Alice: But there are no tigers around here.
Bob: See? It works.
- - - -
It's hard to credit now, but I recall the real existential dread of the bomb. Reagan talking about the "Evil Empire". As a kid I was scared of nuclear war.
Today we still have the nukes but everybody's pretty relaxed about it. Hypersonic weapons are on the horizon (not literally, thank God) which are crazy destabilizing to the international détente. No one cares. "War is so last century."? "Space Force"!? We're not out of the woods yet.
The hippies were right: peace and love are the answers.
In the middle of the cold war USA defense spending never exceed 10%.
The US protects G7 interests from Russia, China, and the oil cartel.
Russia takes what it can with impunity, but they're constrained to their immediate neighbors out of fear of the US and NATO. China is beginning to behave the same way. In the coming decades, they'll likely begin to act more aggressively.
I predict military spending will need to increase and that there is a coming arms race.
Once China's military surpasses the US, we'll have nuclear subs off every coast ready at a moment's notice. Shipping and energy interests will be fiercely defended.
We're going to enter Cold War II, and it's not going to be fun. Let's hope it stays cold.
To me, this is like looking at our ability to treat trauma patients and saying "what a waste - if those people weren't hurt in the first place, these great minds could work on something else".
Well, sure. And if gravity didn't exist people wouldn't fall and get hurt. But it does exist. And so does war.
And now they are moving numbers around spreadsheets for hedge funds? I guess it is an improvement, of sorts.
This was pretty interesting and I really like this approach compared to typical TV documentaries.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjHf9jaFs8XWoGULb2HQR...
Typhoon class has a displacement of 48000 tons.
Los Angeles class has displacement of 6927 tons. Typhoon class is a bit under 7 times bigger. Even the largest American sub (Ohio class) is still less then half the size of a Typhoon (the largest submarines ever built) at 18750 tons
edit: As a side not Russians have mainly moved away from the old Typhoon and replaced it with Borei class which is half the size (24000 tons). Only 1 Typhoon class sub is still in active service.
That's quite massive.
The Japanese I-400-class submarines/submersible aircraft carriers, which I believe are still the largest diesel submarines built, were under 7000 tons.
According to the internet you seem to be right, the Qing-class gets very close but not quite there: wiki lists 6628t, versus 6670t for the for the I-400.
Source: https://interestingengineering.com/uncovering-i-400-japanese...
The closer comparison would be to the US Ohio-class missile sub, which is 3x the size of the LA class with the same complement.
Payload. One type carries a couple dozen medium-range ballistic missiles, and the other doesn't.
It also important to note that once an SSBN launches, there will likely be return fire from either land or sea based ballistic missiles that will boil the ocean for 50nm, incoming in 30-60 minutes. So tactically it is hard to launch just one nuke... It's full commitment or nothing. Just another cheery aspect of escalation dynamics.
Aside from overstating operational readiness, you also upped the W88 yield from it's actual 455KT and, while most sources do reported that 4-5 warheads per missile is typical, you assumed all in the fleet or W88s, while they seem to be a mix of W88 and 90KT W76.
So it's a lot less ready to go than you've estimated here.
But, OTOH, it's still a lot.
SLBM are big, a Trident II is 13.6m long and 2.11m wide[0] and Ohios need to fit them straight up plus the hull, so we're talking 14m moulded depth or so (excluding the sail), and a pretty similar beam, at which point… you just have a big sub, because it can't exactly be a ball: you need to fit 12 Tridents in a row, plus the reactor, engine, crew compartments, passages for the crew to move around, torpedo tubes, and enough stores to last for literally months.
Attack subs can have vertically mounted cruise missiles but those are puny compared to an SLBM, a Tomahawk is 6.25m long with booster[1]: an Ohio-class carries 24 Tridents in SSBN configuration, if converted to SSGN it carries 154 tomahawks.
Los Angeles carries 37, Seawolf carries 50 (and on both this competes with torpedoes and anti-ship missiles, on an Ohio you get 24 tridents or 154 tomahawks plus a dozen torpedoes or anti-ship missiles).
[0] and Typhoon's SLBMs were even larger at 16.1m by 2.4
[1] and 0.5m wide
Another solution would be to do what the North Korean missile subs, putting the missile tubes in the (lengthened) sail.
The US used to have something like this in the Regulus, their intended launcher (the Grayback-class) essentially had hangars.
The great advantage of SLBMs is that the vertical mounting and a good enough launch sequence means you don't have to surface to launch: https://youtu.be/sUlXty69-Y8
I imagine flipping from horizontal to vertical would put stresses on the rocket body, so there are engineering problems to solve, but still it's surprising that the only way to solve that problem has to been to build a launch platform 5 or 10 times bigger than is otherwise desirable.
That would make the entire thing more complicated with more chances of failure because now the SLBM wobbles around when it tries to right itself up (on a non-aerodynamic axis so more chance it'll move wrong), you need much bigger openings for the missiles, and your gain will be limited: remember, they're 2m wide so if you stack them by 4 you still need 9m for the missiles alone except now you also need to have 3 rows of missiles meaning you need a lot of extra horizontal space (in the current configuration the missile compartment of an Ohio is about 40m, it'd need to be 60+). It also makes the launch procedure take longer, as the missile can't accelerate as fast out of its casing: it doesn't just pop straight up like a cork anymore.
There are designs that use the sail, the North Koreans are using that configuration. They took old Romeo class and extended the sail back along the hull to fit 3 launch tubes. But the tubes extend so far down into the hull that they have had to remove batteries in order to do it. Which is a pretty severe compromise as what you absolutely want in such a sub is endurance.
Interestingly they have designated those missiles Pukkuksong, which translates as... Polaris!
Because a missile sub is, loosely, an attack sub with an ICBM base strapped to it. (Yes, technically SLBMs aren't ICBMs, but late Cold War SLBMs had ranges greater than the upper end for IRBMs, and so would be ICBMs if land based.)
> and what the trade offs are here - manoeuvrability, cost?
The boomer trades off maneuverability for the ability to destroy a moderate-size country with nuclear hellfire from thousands of miles away.
It was like 3 submarines joined together. http://www.skitzone.com/2010/photos-of-russian-typhoon-class...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ericsson_Dialog (1964)
Was there a soviet-era clone of this phone? Or maybe Ericsson (Sweden) actually exported this to the Soviet Union during the 70s? That metallic red facia/dial cover thing looks decidedly non-scandinavian-market.
After tearing one down as a kid in the 80s I can attest to its mechanical robustness; I can certainly see why the soviet military would pick this model for their new submarine class in 1976.
The USSR was pretty good at copying western tech and calling it their own. And they'd mass produce the shit out of everything, for the military, for civilians, everyone would get the same thing.
This was the same era when Sweden spent an insane amount of the national economy (like 5%) to develop and build a very large number of Draken and Viggen aircraft in order to defend Sweden in case the Soviets decided to invade.
Do you recognize this ring sound?
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c9/Ericsson...
It does seem to be an export variant however, as the Swedish pulse dial system had the number 0 first: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cb/Dialog_1...
As an anecdote this is why the emergency number in Sweden used to be 90 000, in the dark or in a smoke-filled room you'd be able to feel your way to the last number(9), and then pull four short times from 0 to the finger stop to get emergency service.
It's fascinating that they thought about a swimming pool in a submarine, and also a galley and toilet in SU-34, another very fascinating Soviet design.
My Lord, these things were like the Galaxy-class Enterprise from Star Trek. They were almost cruise liners.
Namely, keeping crew happy and capable when on looong cruise with no port calls and living in enclosed space.
And I'm not sure the ballistic missile submarine computing market is ripe for disruption, or that less than a few billion is a reasonable cost target for a nuclear powered stealth multi megaton missile silo.
But a lot of the cost is due to making sure that things work in harder conditions than office/home, that the parts can be repaired quickly, etc. It also usually has to work for longer than typical lifespan targeted by server vendors (3-5 years for normal server, 20-30 years for industrial/military hw)
All of those requirements also mean that there's less made, so you have less exploitation of economies of scale - even if you use COTS chips, the market for, let's say, OpenVPX SBCs with specific connector configuration is pretty small. So even efforts to commoditise parts run into problems like that.
https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/51791/how-is-a-...
https://glance-efis.com/direct-and-indirect-attitude-indicat...
https://englishrussia.com/2014/10/26/sauna-in-the-submarine/
A lathe and some tools isn't that expensive. As a rough guess, that one is probably something like $20k worth of tools. Maybe double that including the cost of the floor space? Changing course and getting deliveries at sea is really expensive, so easy to imagine it'd pay for itself if you need it just once.
https://federatedtool.com/king-kc-1440ml-2-14-x-40-gearhead-... <- $7k for a quite capable lathe and some tooling.
Their engines were very unreliable, they could do overhauls mid-flight. Airplanes around that time were just as unreliable, but flew shorter hops. Had to overhaul or swap their engines quite regularly between flights.
https://www.facebook.com/PatriotsPoint.org/posts/the-difficu...
Everything looks engineered, it’s nice in its own way but as a final product I would imagine that something designed to be more upbeat and tidy can be beneficial for the psychology of the crew.
In that environment, wouldn't you rather have our crews sharp and focused?
Those were not inside the submarine, right ?
Because of that, Typhoons were designed with crew comfort in mind, with lots of amenities, ensuring crew performance after several months underwater.
This reminds me of the movie: https://www.netflix.com/title/80202236?s=a&trkid=13747225&t=...
https://www.google.ch/maps/@64.5739821,39.7815937,1702m/data...
What an interesting picture overall it is ;)
edit: also, they've got an arcade machine about submarine combat! Wonder whose idea that was.
That space would be free-flooding when submerged. I'll bet that it makes coming into and out-of port much easier environmentally on the topside crew. Soviet submarine bases were much farther to the north than Americans'.
Supposedly those submarines are not active any more (probably explains the photos), but the typical state of "not caring about things" is a very communist approach. Even in military.
Compare this with the American approach of caring about quality.
I mean, probably better for everyone if their ships go down as often as they go down, but just wanted to make an insight on mentality.
Yeah, no. These two Typhoons have been mothballed for a long time and are in the process of being disassambled.
> probably better for everyone if their ships go down as often as they go down
I'm confused, are you talking about American ships?
TK-17 and TK-20 where officially decommissioned in 2004/2006. They were probably effectively decommissioned years before that but it'd make bad PR to say so. The pictures are from 2009 so that's many years sitting neglected with probably just enough people to keep the reactor alive and theft at bay.