Old boy with a sense of humour

As a viable option, so was Concorde.

Let's have a list of *great* aircraft carrier manufacturers, then.

Heavy lift cargo stuff - An124 and similar.

Su-35/27, or whatever.

Typhoon class.

Challenger and Columbia.

Tanks are an outmoded form of combat vehicle nowadays.

In summary, Russian technology is right up there with the Brits.

 

Champ wibbled forthrightly:

You're not far wrong. Technology doesn't have to reflect hi-tech all
the time, does it? There are over numerous variants of the AK-47. It's
one of those weapons that's so basic, that it _just_ doesn't go wrong.
I've seen and fired one that was dumped into a mud bath before use.
Absolutely amazing weapon it is.

Inaccurate as **** though.

 

ginge wibbled forthrightly:

I've seen Getafix using them.

 

M J Carley wibbled forthrightly:

You sure? I'm sure that the Russians kept loads of German POWs right up
until '55. The last load were only released when Stalin died. Wasn't
that the same for German scientists?

 

That engineering worked, where other people's didn't (and the
contribution of basic science to technology is usually overstated
anyway). If you want cutting edge science: Kapitsa, Landau, Gel'fand
and Kolmogorov look like the real thing to me.

 

Noisy and it didn't have the range. Needed engines on reheat to maintain
SS flight, rather than just punch through the sound barrier, didn't it?

Perhaps we were lucky.

I'm waiting for someone to mention pencils ;-)

 

Concorde was noisy too.

Spacesuits: they built better spacesuits.

 

I also remember a TV programme when they let one of the US astronauts
into the Russian 'elephants' graveyard' for the first time ever:
mid-1990s, IIRC. Odd: the Russians never threw anything away. They
just stashed it somewhere in case it came in useful. As a nation, I
think they were a bit sheddi.

Anyway, lo and behold, among all the old boosters, capsules and half-
completed whatevers, there was the lunar lander for the abortive
Russian moonshot that was pre-empted by Apollo 11. It looked rather
like Eagle, but was smaller, and was unpressurised. One man would have
ridden it down to the surface, standing up in a spacesuit. And all the
attitude controls were mechanical, via levers with handles and
twistgrips on them.

The Yank got into this thing and experimentally puilled this, pushed
that and twiddled the other and watched as the attitude nozzles
swivelled. His face was an absolute *picture*. he was stunned.

His verdict? It would have worked, but the guy in it probably had to
be braver than (even) he was.

 

Didn't they just copy Concorde and then find they couldn't make the
thing to the correect tolerances?

 

I doubt it: the foreplane is a quite different solution to the problem
of getting enough lift at take-off.

 

Shit at the complex stuff, those Russians. They should stick to making
the simple stuff like, say, voting machines.

 

And computer games based around geometrical shapes.

 

Yeah, but apart from that, what have the Russians ever done for us?

 

I sit corrected. The point of the foreplane is not so much to improve
the handling as to allow the wing to hold a high enough incidence to
generate lift at low speed.

The economics of Concorde were also appalling.

 

Has anyone mentioned totty yet? They're very good at that.

 

*raises hand*

Well, there's also the vodka.

 

Well, yeah, but there are degrees of appalling-ness Christ knows
how noisy it was, with the afterburners on for the entire flight....

 

with caviar, one would hope. And vodka.

Yes yes, I got it, unfunny as it was.

 

If there wasn't progress for the sake of it, then progress would never
happen.

I disagree with the concept of built in obsolesce. I just think that
change happens much faster at this point in history than people are
comfortable with.

 

Not a fair comparison. The US didn't really try. There was always a
large political movement against an SST, and in hindsight, they were
right. There were too few airports in the US where they could land,
and it was never a viable economic venture.

urm, that's actually an argument in favor of Western superiority in
complex technology. The Soviet way of bulldozing through a problem and
using brute force instead of fail-safe procedures and efficient
technology left a large piece of landscape uninhabitable, while TMI
was an in-house problem with negligible effect on the people and land
around it.

Again, an unfair comparison. It wasn't that the US _couldn't_ make a
space station as good or better, but why bother spending so much time
and money for a duplicate effort when the Soviet station worked? And
politics played a role, as bi-national cooperation was more important
than technological one-up-manship.

Yes, NASA uses Soyuz, but the shuttle has been effective for 30 years
- not a bad record considering the control system is still less
powerful than your basic desktop PC. The Soyuz program has actually
suffered more disasters and killed more people, but with a
totalitarian government and top down media control, the risks they're
willing to take are different.

It really is apples and oranges. Innovation is in the blood of Western
civilization, whereas the industrial revolution didn't reach Russia
until the 20th Century.