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Comment by potato3732842 | Hacker News Reader

It would be pretty stereotypically Soviet to create a parachute system that only mostly (some of the Venera probes kinda crashed) works in the intended use case (short 1-way trip to Venus) but also somehow manages to work once way, way, way outside of its intended operating environment (50yr orbiting earth).

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Parachute deployment was possibly gasodynamic rather than electronically controlled. In which case there's a broad similarity on reentry in Earth atmosphere which could trigger the release.

Sounds unlikely, but it could have malfunctioned. I believe the deceleration chute was designed to deploy after the hot entry phase and be triggered mechanically once crossing the certain deceleration threshold of about 2g (I could be wrong though, take it with a huge grain of salt). It also worked as a pilot chute for the cap protecting the main one.

In my experience, in soviet engineering they don't augment stuff unless absolutely necessary. As a result, stuff tend to work as long as the physics work. It results in relatively crude but simple and reliable machines. The elegance comes from simplicity, in western tech the elegance comes from being well thought and designed for specific use cases. I.e. a Lada will be uncomfortable, loud, uneconomical car but at the same time it will withstand abuse and be easy to repair enough to get it going.

Thinking about the elevator in our commie block, it would have given a heart attack to a western European. Instead of having double doors to keep us safe from the moving wall, it had pads on the bottom and top edge so if your hand or leg is stuck, the pad will be pushed and the elevator will stop immediately. Also there was a tiny cabinet door on the right side so you can access the mechanism to force open the door or force move/halt the elevator. As kids, we would be experimenting with those mechanisms. They worked every single time, no legs or arms were lost.

A Lada is actually an Italian car built under license.

Neah, paternoster is quite a common elevator design in the west: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paternoster_lift

Depends on the model. It's Lada Niva that is legendary.

How could I forget! Many apologies.

I often see one parked in my area (in Uruguay) with a sticker that says “Land Rover recovery vehicle”

"The name paternoster ("Our Father", the first two words of the Lord's Prayer in Latin) was originally applied to the device because the elevator is in the form of a loop and is thus similar to rosary beads used as an aid in reciting prayers."

I would have thought the name was related to the users praying before entering to increase their chances of surviving the ordeal.

Although this mechanism looks scary it's actually fine.

The reason even its proponents accept you wouldn't build these now is that they have terrible accessibility, so they're only practical as an extra option.

despite that, it looks like the reason no new paternosters are built and existing ones are removed is safety. unfortunately this is considered to be more important than cultural heritage protection.

i have used one at the university of vienna. sadly it was removed almost 20 years ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paternoster_lift#Safety

Their overall rate of accidents is estimated as 30 times higher than conventional elevators

Germany saw an average of one death per year due to paternosters

Huh, that's much higher than I expected, thanks.

We used to love riding in them at our university in the late 80s/90s. And when you proceed to ride over the top will the car flip upside down? We managed to scare at least one of our classmates into believe this could happen. The whole thing felt as exciting as a carnival ride in retrospect ...

Calling paternosters 'common' in the West is quite a stretch. They are a curiosity where they are found precisely because there are so few.

Only place I've ever come across one was Napier College, Edinburgh in the mid 1970s. I found it quite scary, and actually preferred to take the stairs. I seem to remember it was actually shut down, for undisclosed reasons.

I also used these ones in Edinburgh decades ago, and the same model at Leeds uni which was a similar vintage. The Napier one there is a story about a lecturer convincing two students it went upside down and if you tried to loop the loop you had to stand on your hands to do the transition... much hilarity when they appear upside down on the other side.

we discovered the same joke independently in Germany. loved it.

For some reason I looked into this a couple of weeks ago, and discovered there's one in Amsterdam pretty close to where I often work, in the Grand Hotel Amrâth. It's supposedly open to the public every Sunday between 10am and 2pm. I think it's only the second time I've seen one in person, and the previous one has been demolished.

Have a look up on the Russian town called Togliati

Does not sound like they talked about the paternoster lift though: they did bring up doors and implied lift stopping in stations.

I had the pleasure of working closely with a Russian engineer on a team once and had to “massage” his stuff quite often into a state that would be deemed acceptable to leadership. It looked terrible, hacked together, haphazard - but it literally never broke. It’s been the better part of a decade now but I wouldnt be surprised if his stuff outlived mine.

I've once built a distributed scheduler to run PHP jobs over a cluster of several thousand machines, before Kubernetes was a thing. It's only a few thousand lines of code and perfectly matches the description of being terrible, hacked together, etc. It also rarely broke and the company still uses it to this day, 10 years later, with almost no adjustments. My ex-colleagues are also saying that wherever they go they miss that framework (even though it's technically open source). And yes, I'm Russian :).

My elevator has double doors, but some of them were installed with too large of a gap between doors that a child can get trapped. The solution is to bolt plastic bumpers to the back of the outer door. Which, hey. Works.

To be fair Venus' atmosphere is pretty much hell.

Higher up the Venusian atmosphere is surprisingly earth-like. Interestingly though, once a probe gets deep enough into the atmosphere a parachute becomes unnecessary because the atmosphere has gotten so thick that a probe can simply soft-land.

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