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Comment by galaktor | Hacker News Reader

I must say that I find it difficult to read beyond the first sentence which says "I adore weapons. Of every sort." This honestly creeps me out a bit.

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It's a great opening line: personal, informative, and establishing a credential - who would want to read an article about weapons written by someone with no interest in the subject? It lets the reader know that the author has an opinion and narrows the topic so that the question of whether a person should be interested in weapons does not interfere with what the author wants to say.

I found it creepy, too. But I also have a habitual interest in the cold war and weapons are where I first encountered the fascinating world of technical specifications. It was something I shared as a child with my father - who was a small boy during the Second World War and a research scientist for the USDOD his entire professional career. That doesn't make me a fan of killing or war. It just means that I have contradictory interests. So obviously I read the article and enjoyed it.

I also puzzled over my enjoyment. The human toll at Stalingrad [celebrated by the author] was immense, and as I have aged I have lost the convenience of demonizing other people through stereo-types. There but for the grace of god, go I - without any belief in the concept of god which it might suggest.

So I appreciate the writing and struggle to find a place for the enjoyment I gained from reading and still mull over what it ignores and celebrates. That's what makes it good - it has a take and doesn't suck.

Stuff that stuck out for me from a technical perspective:

  - make interfaces that connect different things so different
    that you're not tempted to fit the one into the other
    and so that communications about these are unambiguous

  - KISS with a vengenance, better two simple things than one
    complicated

  - the supply lines are more important than the accuracy of
    your weaponry

  - better to make your high performance jets from a  material
    that you can procure during war

And a whole pile of minor elements. Weapons are not to be enjoyed unless for target practice, but the lessons in there are (judiciously) applicable to any kind of engineering.

The concept that really struck me was setting aside technical/engineering autism and calling 130mm mortar rounds '132mm mortar rounds'. It's the required amount of complexity and no more - it exchanges about one bit of additional information on the design side for many many bits of information on the implementation side. It is as close to free as communication gets.

It's the quintessential business decision - it manages laziness and hubris of staff for a vast improvement in user experience. The downside of such decisions is dealing with grumbling snowflakes. Like a Hero of the Valley, Stalin was known for ruthlessly expedient methods for handling dissent.

Well, Soviet/Russia is optimized to fight neighbouring countries. That implies more logistics problems than for e.g. USA.

What shocked me was the secrecy about weapon systems, to train people without letting them even see the equipment they would use if the fertilizer hit the fan.

From a perspective from around 40 years ago, there were two cases:

An open society, with quite a lot of research published. And a closed society, which could import the information from the open society (including a lot about weapon engineering) but kept their cards hidden.

before hindsight, it wasn't obvious which solution would work in the end.

Try getting beyond your distaste for weapons and look at what lies beneath. Most of the time the method of delivery should take a secondary position to the content. Even if the subject is revolting to you there are valuable lessons to be learned here.

I said I found it difficult, not that I wouldn't read on :-)

From reading the article, it seems what he loves about weapons is not their ability to kill, but a lot of the design, the logistics and engineering aspects of weapons.

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