When the MIG-25 was designed, the Soviets didn't have capable semiconductor-circuit repair facilities (probably meaning "people") at some of their remote airfields. That's one. Two, they had poor capability to make high-power, high-frequency semiconductors, so they needed tubes for their radar, anyway. As for the other things that have been remarked upon, such as the ability of tube circuits to withstand EMP -- my experience in researching Soviet manufacturing inclines me to believe that, if it was an issue at all, it was a case of making a virtue out of necessity, after the fact, for political reasons. They did a lot of that in those days.
========== And I have set in meetings right here in the USA where department heads were raked over the coals for failing to meet their scrap accounts because their reject rates were too low, and causing problems with meeting the scrap metal sales contracts.
FWIW -- the corporation [OEM truck part supplier] went out of business some time ago. Something about unfair Japanese competition....
Unka' George [George McDuffee]
------------------------------------------- He that will not apply new remedies, must expect new evils: for Time is the greatest innovator: and if Time, of course, alter things to the worse, and wisdom and counsel shall not alter them to the better, what shall be the end?
Francis Bacon (1561-1626), English philosopher, essayist, statesman. Essays, "Of Innovations" (1597-1625).
I don't think there's really any comparison, George. When I started reporting on international trade and manufacturing I spent a fair amount of time reading about the Soviet Union, from expats and European managers who had ventures in the USSR. You can't remotely compare the inefficiencies and foolishness you'll find in the West with the insanity that went on there.
It's no wonder that they drove themselves into the ground. They had some excellent engineering and materials science and they were capable of making fine products of various kinds. But only in small numbers and at a very high cost. They spent all of that capability on military goods and they had no productive capacity left to make anything else, except with horrible inefficiency and equally horrible quality. That's why they collapsed.
At least some of the Soviet inefficiencies were actually theft. I.e., they could report making 10 widgets where there could be made 15, but in fact the waste was stolen and converted to gadgets, which were sold on the black market without reporting. So the enterprise was not as inefficient as it seemed from official reports, similar to people here who are cheating on taxes.
But certainly that could not compensate for the big productivity gap.
I don't think so, Jim. We still have the capability and the economic structure. We have, believe it or not, the highest level of productivity in the world. We also have the highest levels of manufacturing output in history, I think; I'd have to track it before 1992, because we changed the industry identifying system then. It's at least the highest since 1992, and, IIRC, that means it's the highest in history.
This whole thing is widely misunderstood and misrepresented. What's happened is that our economy has grown much faster in other areas, so it isn't apparent that manufacturing output has continued to increase. The
*percentage* of our economy represented by manufacturing has declined by something like 50%, IIRC. It's also true that productivity has made such enormous gains that the number of *people* employed in manufacturing has been flat through that period, and has declined in many high-volume manufacturing segments, as our population has grown and other segments of the economy have overshadowed manufacturing.
I think that the inefficiencies were outrageous anyway. Theft, corruption, lying statistics of output -- all were epidemic in the Soviet system. But it sucked in a very big way, any way you measure it.
I was fortunate to spend some time in Canada at a branch of the OEM truck parts company doing SPC training and implementation. They had engineers from all over the world. Of particular interest to me were the ones from Russia [USSR at that time -- late 70s], west and east Germany, and India. We consumed vast quantities of Molsen X and Lablatt Blue, and I arrived at several conclusions, after extended discussions about like what we see on ACM and RMC, without the B. S.
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the French/Qubec beer was good too [don't remember any of the brand names].
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First off, the particular solution to an engineering design/production problem selected will depend on what you have available and the priorities. One example was a small component [2 lbs steel] that was to be produced is relatively large numbers, with some strength and safety requirements.
While a generalization the US engineesr/designers would go for the cheapest piece-part cost amortized over the production life of the part, generally some sort of stamping.
The German engineers would go with a forging to produce the best possible part, even though the physical properties and strength:weight would be much better than needed, with extra machining required.
The Russian engineers/designers wanted to know what capabilities the corporation had so they could improve the internal utilization of the existing equipment and manpower, and as there was a small die casting and iron/steel foundry operation, would use a malable/ductile iron casting, although this would involve considerable shipping and extra machining. Identification with ones "Artel" was very high, even to the extent that most meals were taken there, their social life was organized around their Artel, and what was "best" for the Artel, was best.
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[A great deal like SecDef "Engine Charlie" Wilson: "What's good for General Motors is Good for America, and what's good for America is good for General Motors." ]
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The Indians tended to be more like the Germans, although [at the time] they admitted if they were still in India, they would use whatever was available, most likely some sort of local low tech cupola furnace iron casting with extra material for strength.
Tooling was also a consideration. Wood patterns could be produced quickly and cheaply, while stamping/pressing and forging dies take considerable time and are high cost, requiring highly skilled labor and machines to produce. Much depended on how "firm," i.e. how subject to change or termination, the product/component was.
Thus what is an optimal solution in one context is sub-optimal or even impossible in another context, with a different set of tacit criteria, meta narratives, and priorities.
Unka' George [George McDuffee]
------------------------------------------- He that will not apply new remedies, must expect new evils: for Time is the greatest innovator: and if Time, of course, alter things to the worse, and wisdom and counsel shall not alter them to the better, what shall be the end?
Francis Bacon (1561-1626), English philosopher, essayist, statesman. Essays, "Of Innovations" (1597-1625).
On Wed, 11 Jun 2008 19:28:49 -0700, with neither quill nor qualm, Jim Stewart quickly quoth:
Ditto here, Jim. My product isn't making me rich, but it keeps me in socks. ;)
-- Besides the noble art of getting things done, there is a nobler art of leaving things undone. The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of nonessentials. -- Lin Yutang
The Soviet stuff was usually crude but effective, and produced cheaply in large quantities.
There was a deeper reason. The Warsaw Pact had about five times the numbers of tanks and men at arms in Europe as the West. So, the West had to have "force multipliers" sufficient to overwhelm a 5:1 numerical advantage. Thus the complexity. Which the West could do, while the Soviet could not.
A lot of people seem to feel that way. I don't want to oversimplify the situation, because there have been a lot of shifts in US manufacturing that have distributed a lot of pain around to different segments. But the impression that US manufacturing is collapsing is not correct.
One thing we noticed a few years ago is that certain segments, such as moldmaking, had built up during the '90s, to the point where we had overcapacity that wasn't readily apparent. That business depends upon growth and new models in the car industry for a high percentage of total moldmaking business. If the economy even slows down slightly -- and it was hot in the late '90s, so even a tapering off to normal growth rates looked like a slowdown -- the moldmaking business falls off to a sharper degree than the economy as a whole, the overcapacity becomes obvious, and a lot of newer shops go bust. From inside of the moldmaking business, it looked like the sky was falling.
To get the big manufacturing picture you have to pick apart the Census numbers segment-by-segment, then look at the employment numbers, and so on. I've done that a few times over the years, but not recently. It's a lot of work. Maybe I'll write a book about it. The problem is, with all of the automation that's been going on, there aren't a lot of people left to read it. d8-)
There was no concept of real cost of things in the Soviet Union. I have a nice story about that. Russian had a sophisticated weapons program, and as part of that had huge isotope separation plants located near their hydroelectric power dams in Siberia, which produced pure isotopic elements at zero perceived cost. These are sometimes important; for instance, pure isotopic diamond has heat conductivity multiple times that of regular diamond, which in itself is a record-breaking heat conductor.
Some scientists in my old department needed a pure isotope of cadmium. Free market price of what he needed was in tens of thousands of dollars per gram, but he heard about some Russians in their Academy of Sciences having a stock. He took some measuring equipment (an oscilloscope or a boxcar averaging voltmeter, or something like that), and went to Moscow to barter with the cadmium guy. The Russian pulled out an enormous chunk, worth possibly millions, from his drawer, and grabbed a pair of scissors (cadmium is about as hard as lead). A horse-trading session ensued where our guy and the Russian kept moving the cut line until they settled on a fair-sized chunk. There was a lot of samples over many years that got made out of that cadmium, back in the seventies.
That can happen in the US when people get the attitude that anything provided by the government is free. I had a bottle of heavy water for Nuclear Magnetic Resonance experiments that was regarded similarly. Not by me, but I was the junior guy in the lab.
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