I recently had the luck of spending several weeks/months on a Russian icebreaker from the soviet era. It was incredible. The engine control room was a work of art. Room after room of thoughtfully constructed controls with a huge emphasis on design. The bridge was also stunning. As someone who grew up post-cold-war in the United States, it was really something to be immersed in the aesthetic and culture of Russia in that era. I'll dig up some photos and post them here in a bit maybe.
EDIT:
Alright, here they are. I'm currently working on building a static website for my photography/work... but it's not done. So I'm sharing a small selection quickly in the stupidest way possible (google photos).
I’ve long had the thought in my head of going on a different kind of “cruise” where instead of getting on a cruise ship I manage to make my way onto a container ship or another type of work boat.
Getting to spend time on a Soviet ice breaker sounds even more exciting!
Going with a US outfitter is the most efficient option, but is also expensive. A poor student with little money and a lot of time could try joining a research team as an unpaid helper. It has been years since I toyed with the idea, but when I did there were university groups of all sorts, from military-funded data collectors to environmentalists. University teams are often interested in saving limited grant money by paying fewer workers. This is a lot less glamorous option and one would need to do some work, but the ticket becomes free.
I went to the Antarctic on a (refitted) soviet era ice-hardened (anything up to ~1m thickness) ship a few years back, as a paying tourist - a lot of the more niche operators who go to more remote corners run old Soviet ships - in fact, the only other ship that we saw in a month down there was a similar vintage soviet ship - Akademik someone-or-other.
The bridge had largely been refitted to modern standards and design, but the engineering control room was a thing of beauty - blinkenlights and dials and levers and buttons like goddamned pornography. The aesthetic (cream, green, black, chrome, domed lamps, tactile light-up buttons) was almost identical to that of a soviet missile silo I visited a few years back near Pervomaisk, Ukraine - which isn’t altogether surprising, as they were likely built in the same shipyard - soviet control bunkers were basically submarines turned on end, mounted on shock absorbers, and shoved down a silo.
Fun aside: our guide was one of the button-men back in the day. He explained that two keys, spaced eight feet apart, had to be turned simultaneously to arm the launch controls. He then explained and demonstrated that the slot in the tip of the flag standard which stood proudly behind the control chairs was designed and curved such that you could hook the key in the control lock through it, sit down at the other key, hold the end of the standard, and give it a pull, which would turn the “out of reach” key as you turned yours. It was “officially unofficially official” in his (translated) words, to be done in the case of the incapacitation of the other launch control officer.
> hold the end of the standard, and give it a pull, which would turn the “out of reach” key as you turned yours. It was “officially unofficially official” in his (translated) words, to be done in the case of the incapacitation of the other launch control officer.
This is a reason why USSR never adopted a end-to-end PAL like US did. Union's PAL system only worked on the command chain level, and the remote launch command was only one of multiple options.
They feared that the US may attack the PAL link component, and it will prevent the launch. The same reason lead to mobile launchers being made one man operable, though even colonel level officers had little knowledge of the system operation besides "press buttons like on this picture if given code word blah-blah"
It is good that now we have Ukrainian launch officers that can divulge information on Soviet launch tech. The part of strategic rocket forces that stayed in Russia managed to keep secrecy perfect for 30 years.
> It is good that now we have Ukrainian launch officers that can divulge information on Soviet launch tech. The part of strategic rocket forces that stayed in Russia managed to keep secrecy perfect for 30 years.
Why is it good ? So that your country thinks they can "win" a nuclear war ?
In a perfect world there wouldn't be any nuclear weapon. But in our imperfect world I'd rather have MAD than some yahoo thinking first strike is a good idea because they think they can stop the opposite side from retaliating.
"Nuclear parity is a condition at a given point in time when opposing forces possess offensive and defensive systems approximately equal in overall combat effectiveness"
World with nukes appeared to be more peaceful than without. While nuclear superpowers have parity, conventional war between them is impossible. This is the reason why we we never had WWIII between Soviets/Russia/China and US/NATO.
However, other measures like economical pressure and trade wars, espionage, proxy wars, and now informational war are still ongoing. I would leave as a statement that all these things are "much better" than real World War.
This is a reason why USSR never adopted a end-to-end PAL like US did.
There's a lot of information that the USA only nominally had PAL. The military implemented PAL on orders from the President, but then set the PAL code to 00000000.
What you’re saying is that there was a deliberate mechanism by which a single man could turn both keys and trigger a launch? That’s WarGames-level horrifying.
Incidentally I’ve always deeply respected Soviet officers for being very level-headed in situations that should have precipitated a ‘retaliatory’ launch, such as during the Cuban missile crisis and when one of their satellites mistook glints off lakes for the IR sigantures of a first strike launch.
>What you’re saying is that there was a deliberate mechanism by which a single man could turn both keys and trigger a launch? That’s WarGames-level horrifying.
Isn't the opposite mostly a security theater? As if a single person couldn't do it with some ingenuity anyway even on mechanisms that need two persons?
For starters, they could always point a gun to another person to make them turn the other key...
If you point a gun at someone they don't necessarily do as you wish. In military situations the personnel are trained (some might say brainwashed) to sacrifice themselves; which should be relatively easy when the alternative is that all your family die from radiation poisoning (or obliteration if they're lucky).
Arguably in some regimes chain-of-command is a greater incentive than a gun as retaliation against families (for "treason"/cowardice) seems reasonably common.
It's still a mystery to me whether this country had actual industrial design in the Soviet era—I guess it should've had economic research at least. But Soviet industrial looks were mostly regarded as ‘ugly but functional’ by the folks.
IMO it's only now that pre-digital hardware looks appealing, through the nostalgia for ‘simpler times’. What with onscreen controls emulating bulky knobs, buttons and displays of e.g. hifi equipment and 80s' synths.
I was going to say something similar. The panels do look nice but don't seem much different than those of the West pre-digital era. I seem to recall that the nuclear ice breakers were a point of pride for the USSR, so it's likely that the panels received an above-average level of attention and are atypical.
I don't think that the appeal is just nostalgia though. Modern control rooms and equipment racks just don't have the pretty-looking hardware that the older ones do. Control rooms usually have big displays with network diagrams on them that aren't sexy anymore, along with a bunch of workstations. Equipment racks usually are dominated by LCDs and membrane switches that look a bit chintzy, no big pushbuttons in chromed bezels anymore.
I've heard the US Navy is going away from screens; they were a bad idea, cause a lot of confusion and they're reverting back to analog switchgear because of the tactile feedback.
Ugly but functional might be the way of the future!
Touchscreens are just evil in any sort of physically involved environment, e.g. a car or even a kitchen stove. You can have ‘good-looking and functional’ (with physical controls too), but touchscreens in such a setup are rather ‘good-looking and dysfunctional’.
Game controllers are the perfect example of ergonomically-tuned physical controls with sleek looks. And afaik the US military uses Xbox controllers in drone control or something like that.
I recall that there were some pretty long threads here after the US warship hitting some commercial vessel. The big issue wasn't using a screen but that the designers had taken advantage of having screens to create a multi-functional interface so one station could serve different functions, or functions could be moved between stations. Flexible, but confusing. I think the move is not to analog control, but back to single-purpose controls. Also, even if mechanical controls replace touchscreens, I'm sure that there will still be an optical encoder and field bus behind everything.
Why not physical analogue controls that are motorised like in some aeroplane controls. You can turn the dial, or the computer can turn the dial - and supposedly (737Max aside) allow physical control to override.
Being able to replace a physical station seems a great benefit in a warship.
I think of it this way: tactile controls for operation, read-only screens for situational awareness, touch or keyboard/mouse for configuration. Just don't put them on real-time critical paths.
There was no design,as a subject, in Soviet Union. It all fell under industrial engineering blanket and the looks were just a part of the entire process to get a working product. Architecture, however,was somewhat unique in this aspect,as there was more expressiveness in some works(non residential only,though).
This is not true. There was a whole institute doing industrial design: the Soviet Scientific Research Institute of Industrial Aesthetics [1].
That institute was also publishing a monthly "Technical Aesthetics" magazine from 1964 to 1992.
Ok,fair enough, looks like they were taking it more serious than I ever thought.
It's quite interesting that they called it Industrial Aesthetics.
Also,the Russian Wikipedia article is extremely detail on what was going on there:
https://ru.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9C%D0%BE%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%...
Oh heck, I've seen pics of the PT minivan back in the 90s, in the stash of either ‘Tech for the Youth’ or ‘Science and Life’. Its look has stuck with me as the embodiment of Soviet retrofuturism, which is what I actually remember as daring Soviet tech design.
I kept wondering a bit if RAF-2203 took some cues from the PT. Other RAF minivans seem to be obviously inspired by VW Type 2.
I don't think there's any such thing as "no design" (though I understand you to mean the academic subject).
All design evokes something. Colours, font, margin and spacing, edges and borders - it all evokes some things that came before it more than others, and the relationship with the human body and its feeling of agoraphobia and claustrophobia, kinematics - whether controls are pointy or smooth, hard or soft, stiff or slick or springy, continuous or with detents - it all adds up to an aesthetic.
You can't help but have design. You know when things don't "feel" right. When something feels flimsy instead of solid; when it's haphazard instead of regular. And when the design is exceptionally poor, chaotic, that too is a design - a kind of mad, insane design, or primitive and naive, unskilled - it always evokes something.
I meant it as an academic subject. In terms of colour,shape,form, function,and other,so called design properties, were well understood, however not always applied, especially in consumer products.
> the looks were just a part of the entire process to get a working product
Well, that would be enough for ‘industrial design’ as a discipline—the question is whether ‘the product does not cause suffering from looking at it and touching it’ was considered a part of the criteria for ‘working’.
Seen that, yeah. Alas it has an obvious flair of a ‘photoshop design’ with no connection to any engineering work.
The ortholinear keyboard would be notable, if again it had any basis in reality aside from the ‘йцукенг’ Cyrillic layout—which however has punctuation cast away beyond reach.
I had the luck of visiting post-soviet countries in Eastern Europe, and I can say I was somewhat admired by the block buildings that they have. Rows and rows of massive constructions that look alike, we even visited some apartments, and they had the same room placement, some had really old chandeliers, which gave a strange sense of luxury in a room that's really plain and simple. I think we visited the district where Chernobyl was filmed, but right now I can't remember the exact country.
I think it's somewhat similar to the cookie-cutter houses in the USA: The best possible accommodation for the masses at the least cost possible.
I grew up in one of those blocks till age of 15. They are not all the same but they come in a few types and few sizes. It's strangely comforting to have the house out of the equation, everybody has the same house so it's not a matter of discussion. That said, for some strange reason it was customary to show all the rooms to the people who visit you for the first time.
These blocks are ugly and are getting uglier as they decay but there are many people who "made it" and still live in these blocks and park their Bentleys in the parking that 30 years ago was full of Lada, Moskwitsch and Trabants.
Also, not everyone "made it" so some floors are renovated others are in desperate situation.
They don't necessarily get uglier, as many are insulated/painted/renovated/etc. and become quite presentable, especially if they become a bit more individualized.
But one thing that is noticeable that blocks built earlier (50s/60s) are usually better than those built later (70s/80s). Better quality material, more thought to living spaces around them, playgrounds, etc.
Sad to see the decline. I still don't fully understand - what went so wrong after Khrushchev? Did the leaders just get too old and they couldn't trust new blood in the upper echelons of the party?
(Note: obviously things were bad before Khrushchev too - Stalin was horrible and committed genocide, but he was more purgy and less stagnant than Brezhnev and Andropov)
There is a great movie about a guy that drunkenly gets deposited in the wrong city, which has the same street names, apartments and so on. Hilarity ensues when he's dropped off in front of what he thinks is his house on his street:
A funny Russian movie called the irony of fate actually highlights the phenomenon of duplicated buildings and neighbourhoods. A guy gets home drunk at the wrong apartment which looks identical, even the surrounding streets and names. a good watch
The buildings,while slightly different in design,are very similar to what a lot of countries in Europe were building at the time to meet the needs of growing population. The biggest mistake the urban planners did was underestimation of how many cars there will be in the future. That's why it's so common to have a 12 story building with only 20 or so parking lots.
[Edit]
It's more interesting what happened at the end of the soviet occupation,which is usually less visible to foreign visitors: planning permissions for residential properties were relaxed,which meant that there was no longer any limitations on what kind of houses people could build. And most went absolutely bananas. People started building large,most often tasteless buildings with weird features. Fuel was dead cheap so nobody cared too much about insulation and etc.An example built in 1995:
https://m.aruodas.lt/namai-kaune-zaliakalnyje-kalnieciu-g-pa...
Swathes of such houses were built.
A lot of people did self builds and etc.
In a period of 10-15 years,a new class of rich and super rich was formed. This was followed by formation of gated communities, identical to those in all western countries. There, houses do look very different:
https://m.aruodas.lt/namai-vilniuje-valakampiuose-lauru-g-pa...
The argument could be made, that cookie cutter apartments can be interpreted as “white cubes”[0] - and those are a big thing in the art world, since they allow the art to shine and the room design stays out of the way.
You had all the modern comfort at a reasonable price.
Of course most of these buildings aged terribly and now they're mostly inhabited by very poor people. Now you see these decrepit, often crime-ridden "cités" and you wonder why anybody ever thought that was a good idea.
Pretty much every country has it. Khrushchev implemented their mass deployment in the Soviet Union to stem a housing crisis (I think maybe even as one of his earliest actions as chairman...it's been a while since I read about it in an architecture magazine). Once you recognize the form, you see it everywhere, even outside the Soviet bloc; in the US, Canada, etc. The political influence makes their prominence within the urban fabric rise or fall, but the idea behind the building form is pretty much the same: cheap housing for an increasingly urban population without regard to street life, scale, etc., very much in the vein of Corbusier's Cité radieuse. I suspect the economic argument of that kind of construction was hard to argue with at the time.
Corbusier's ideas were often part of the inspiration, only to get heavily pared down due to cost cutting.
For example, a lot of standardized blocks in USSR were originally planned to be made from large "library of designs" to provide varied and well adapted neighbourhoods, however after first few went through the cost cutting measures meant that they were replicated en masse.
Another example is one I have lived in - the longest building in Poland, at over 1.5km length, nicknamed Beijing by many due to super-high density. Critical changes into how the building was built were made by building company on occasion when architects were not around, resulting in long-term damage to comfort and quality of living. Once the architects were back in, it was too late to fix as you'd have to rip out the foundations and start anew.
Several other more "Avant garde" neighbourhoods in Poland suffered from similar issues, often caused by policy that was supposed to encourage innovation, where "rationalisation proposals" (not a good translation but close) that, for example, would lower the cost, were rewarded and often not well checked (if at all). The initial cost savings then turned into heavy issue later on.
A lot could be also said with regards to non-design problems during building, which caused issues due to materiel deteriorating sitting outside waiting for shipment of components necessary to build the required predecessors to the use of the now-rotting ones.
Yep, it's a pool that was filled with saltwater pulled in from Arctic ocean. There was also a sauna! The pool was even full while the ship was breaking ice... check it out:
Looks to me like the pool is stationary relative to the ship, so I would think that the pool water would slosh around. I'm not sure, though. Modern cruise ships have much fancier systems for that sort of thing.
this pool is there by design. On some mid-size and large USSR/Russian military ships which don't have a pool by design, you can find what your local building department would call "unpermitted remodeling" - as you can't really make a hole in a ship's deck floor (i mean theoretically you can, yet it would be a can of worms of totally different scale), the crew would build the pool up so there is only hardly a couple feet between the ceiling and the water and you get into it by climbing up the ladder.
The Russians appear to be super fond of including extravagant amenities on such vessels. The Typhoon class submarines had pools, saunas, gyms, lounges, etc. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrULRXlAlMU
Somehow, I feel like a short inclusion in "The Hunt For Red October" would have been nice. Pointless to the story, of course, but it would have contributed to the sense of grandeur, impressiveness, and "serious business" of the submarine as a machine.
I recall that at the time the movie was made, nothing was known of the Typhoon class except for spy photos of the portion above the waterline while they sat at the docks. One notable error from the movie was a fight scene between the rows of missile tubes. In reality, the submarines had two pressure hulls stuck side-by-side and that space was filled with water.
EDIT:
Alright, here they are. I'm currently working on building a static website for my photography/work... but it's not done. So I'm sharing a small selection quickly in the stupidest way possible (google photos).
https://photos.app.goo.gl/CL6Rc4TE7ddZd4Xo7