
A Classic of Soviet Engineering - The Typhoon-class sub - anateus
http://mockingeye.com/a-classic-of-soviet-engineering
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jacquesm
For all the mocking you have to hand it to the Russians, they designed that
thing on a budget that was probably a very small fraction of what the design
of its American counterpart cost and it was just as deadly.

Don't underestimate engineering because it is done in a less than elegant way,
if the problem got solved and the device fulfilled the requirements and it was
within the budget then it was a good design.

As for the under water stab at the MIG 29, that was a design where the Russian
designers probably outdid their Western counterparts in many ways.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAxx3T53TxM>

~~~
stcredzero
_Don't underestimate engineering because it is done in a less than elegant
way, if the problem got solved and the device fulfilled the requirements and
it was within the budget then it was a good design._

The old Soviet defense design houses benefitted tremendously by being the
follow-on developers. They could see what US defense contractors did, then
figure out how to do it cheaper and more reliably.

That said, the Soviets have had an amazing record of _comparable, cheaper,
more rugged, more reliable_ dating from World War II. Where a US cargo plane
requires infrastructure, a comparable Soviet cargo plane would be able to land
on unpaved airfields and include a manually operated fuel-pump. Where German
designers would require over 20 parts for some doo-dad in an artillery piece,
the US equipment would accomplish the same functionality in about 3/4ths of
the parts, but the Soviets would undercut them by another 3 or 4 parts.

James Dunnigan discusses this in his classic _How to Make War_.

Being the follow-on competitor is actually a great way to avoid
overengineering.

~~~
evgen
While this was a useful design criteria (make it dead-simple and dependable)
it also led to a great deal of over-engineering of many components to provide
the level of durability required. The question that is left unasked here is
"why?" A part that is twice as large as it needs to be will be dependable and
you can create masterfully simplistic designs with them, but it will have more
limited capabilities for a given weight/mass. The reasons were two-fold:
Soviet manufacturing was not up to the task of delivering consistent quality
near the bleeding edge of materials science, and Soviet troops were mostly
conscripts who would horribly abuse equipment through poor training and lack
of education.

From WWII through the late 70s this strategy served the USSR quite well, but
by the 80s their "cheap and simple" approach was leaving them further and
further behind. At the low-end of the performance and design spectrum this
left them with some very nice tools, but the high-end was owned by the west
and in the early to mid 80s an inflection point seems to have been passed
where high-end units could completely dominate a particular battlefield.

~~~
stcredzero
True, but this is mainly true for so-called "conventional" warfare in Europe.
For asymmetrical warfare, especially in parts of the world with less than
stellar infrastructure, "cheap and simple" has been much preferred.

I suspect there's at least one valuable analogy applicable to startups here.

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pvg
You're probably better off looking at pictures of an actual, unromanticized
Typhoon/Akula, even if you don't read Russian.

<http://community.livejournal.com/ru_submarine/17486.html>

~~~
varjag
These two are decommissioned and are being cut apart.

~~~
jedc
That explains why they're in such awful shape.

I was a submarine officer in the US Navy and we would never allow any boat to
look like this; literally rusting all over the place. That said, holy s __t
the Russians built _huge_ boats.

~~~
smallblacksun
The Soviets had to build huge subs. Their missiles and reactors were larger
than the US versions. Also, their reactors weren't nearly as reliable, so they
put two in each boat. They are impressive to look at, though.

~~~
SkyMarshal
I lol'd when I first read that, thinking that by 'not reliable' you meant
their reactors tended to melt down, spike, or blow up, in which case adding a
second one wouldn't really help but would nevertheless fit the American
perception of the Soviet ethos (they pretend to pay us so we pretend to fix
the problem).

~~~
smallblacksun
By not reliable I mean were much more likely to need to be shut down to avoid
something really bad happening. The second reactor allowed them to easily
return to base (or even continue their mission) if they were forced to shut
one of them down. An American sub with a reactor failure would be more or less
stuck, and if it were under the icecap or something like that would be in big
trouble.

~~~
SkyMarshal
Yeah, I know what you meant, I just thought my initial misinterpretation was
funny enough to comment about. Maybe not...

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arethuza
On the subject of "Classics of Soviet Engineering", what about the Soyuz
rocket family:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_%28rocket_family%29>

Still going strong after 40+ and its first launch due from ESA's spaceport in
Q4 2010:

<http://www.esa.int/esaMI/Launchers_Home/SEMXN619Y8G_0.html>

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Luc
A visit to Wikipedia actually confirms this story (I was sure it was a joke
before):
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typhoon_class_submarine#Descrip...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typhoon_class_submarine#Description_and_history)

"Typhoon class submarines feature multiple pressure hulls that simplify
internal design while making the vessel much wider than a normal submarine. In
the main body of the sub, two Delta class pressure hulls lie parallel with a
third, smaller pressure hull above them (which protrudes just below the sail),
and two other pressure hulls for torpedoes and steering gear."

~~~
td
On a tangent: I wonder why wikipedia doesn't list the articles on boats by
their original Russian names, but uses their NATO calling instead. Now you
have the article "Typhoon sub" which is actually about Akula class submarines,
and the article "Akula class submarine", which is about a submarine the
Russians call "Shchuka".

~~~
jacquesm
Part of that is that wikipedia is US centric (even it it tries to be NPOV in
things like names this definitely leaks through), another part is that the
majority of the editors would not be able to verify source in Cyrillic.

The same happens happens with the names of towns and of people all over
wikipedia so it's no surprise to see it happen with the names of classes of
submarines.

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troels
It's like the PHP of the cold war. Ugly as hell and patched together by barely
fitting parts. But it gets the job done.

~~~
protomyth
Depends how noisy it was and would the USA/UK be able to sink it before the
shooting starts.

~~~
InclinedPlane
Quite so. In reality, almost all of the Soviet nuclear missile subs were
nearly continuously shadowed by American hunter killer subs, but the reverse
wasn't true. In the event of an actual nuclear war very few of the Soviet
missile boats would have survived, while almost all of America's would have.

Nevertheless, it turns out that land based ICBMs can also be made highly
survivable so even given this any US/USSR exchange of nuclear weapons would
have been devastating to both sides, regardless of how many subs survived.

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mitjak
Ok, just to reiterate: there is a gym and a pool on board.

