I shall skip the details of why this post is not among those that aged well. :)

But note that while later Soviet military R&D did seem rather hit-or-miss, and some of dark humor it inspired was well earned. I mean, there were old-school chief designers to the very end, like Alexeev — but where were his WIGs, and where were Tupolev’s Boeing knock-offs? Russian R&D naturally is a continuation of those traditions, for good or ill.

I am unaware of any misfeature quite on the level of this design for a vital sensor, however:

https://old.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/a5m0x8/my_name_is_eric_moreno_i_am_a_us_submarine/ebo31vl/

That said, yes, the fic indeed was a wank. With ridiculous projections (using an aircraft carrier and playing Top Gun is unlikely to be on top of the list, at least against a serious adversary. And blatant advertisement. Especially hilarious in case of Patriot — already infamous for hitting friendly flying objects instead of the hostile ones. Whether this issue is actually fixed or not, it was already aging. By now even the Houthis have learned to blindside it, while better equipped adversaries learned to confuse it with modestly sized submunitions.

https://simplicius76.substack.com/p/anatomy-of-mim-104-patriot-destruction

Yes, I think that’s a very convincing set of additions to the issue.

The Russian failure mode as being able to make things but not caring enough about consequences.

The Germans as overengineering.

The US failure mode has a bit of the overengineering too, especially now, but it seems ultimately that the stuff mostly does work very well, the cultural failure mode is to assume it will always be there and cannot be subverted.

I’m not sure I’d want to compare casualties across the Soviet/Russian space program with the US one, these days. After two shuttle disasters, mostly brought on by sheer hubris, and when you examine that Apollo 1 accident… It’s not clear who’s got the better safety record.

I really ought to clarify the things I say about Soviet/Russian engineering. Some of what they do is damn good, but… There’s a cultural syndrome going on with them that’s clearly there, a disregard for caution and due care, a certain insouciance in the face of Murphy. Chernobyl couldn’t have happened to anyone else, the way it went down. I can’t imagine a bunch of Germans doing that sort of slipshod crap. They’d have an accident, all right, but I lay long odds on their version of Chernobyl happening because they built an overly complicated reactor that went out of control because of a symphony of failures caused by that over-sophistication.

Culture informs all endeavors. Chernobyl wouldn’t happen anywhere but the Soviet Union, but that doesn’t mean that atomic reactor accidents are solely a Soviet phenomenon. It’s just that that particular failure mode is uniquely Soviet…

I am pretty sure that I could have you erase all markings on a set of weapons, have you show them to me, and I’d be able to identify pretty damn closely where they came from, based on the quirks of design, and what choices were made. Same-same with the internals on a car, although that’s gotten way more generic and universal. I can still see clear design differences between major sources, though. A German car will still show clear philosophical differences between a Japanese one, in terms of who did the design work, once you’re under the skin. Simple and robust? Probably Japanese. Overly complicated, with scads of specialized tools? German.

Similarly, to the extent these things made the news back then, it was vaguely clear that the Russians had had [as still] a lot more problems with submarine reactors and lost subs in general than the US.

Kirk (IIRC) made some comments about Russian dam engineering a while back.

It’s all very convincing, and I have absorbed the Russian incompetence/get-everything-by-stealing paradigm as much as anyone.

So I also assume that the higher tech the problem and required solution, the more they would f it up. And that technothriller writers really overegg the pudding.

And yet.

They can make a lot work when they need to, as much as they need to. They’ve even come up with stuff in the past.

It’s not that I really think of them as comparable to Germans or Japanese. But consider the other recent threads here and their implications.

We in Angloworld have often paid the price for this sort of thing:

France: bunch of effeminate dancing masters. [A distillation once offered by Derbyshire.]

Germany: stiff necked Prussians with no imagination.

Japan: sandal-wearing goldfish tenders. [Montgomery Burns].

Englishmen or Americans have paid a high price for these sorts of assumptions, even in wars those countries ultimately did win.

So with this, I can’t quite decide where the line is between careless assumption and the reality that it is, after all, still Russia.

I read Cdr Salamander regularly. I doubt anyone there thinks the US navy has fallen to the level of the Soviet navy, let alone the current Russian navy, but there’s a lot of concern about massive procurement blind alleys over decades, process failures, maintenance standards, manning, training, and crashing ships into things more frequently than in the past.

They might be in worse physical readiness now than they were on December 6 1941, though perhaps not yet as complacent.

With Russian ass-clownery dialed to maximum, Denisov would be lucky to make it off the deck, IRL.

And if it inspires the young-uns to go into STEM, all the better.

I feel exactly the same way about them. Technonerds playing at war.

It doesn’t help that they get a lot of their precious technology crushingly wrong too.

For example–Russian carriers? It is to fucking laugh. Does nobody have an appreciation for the complexity of simply getting aircraft off the deck, or noticed the complete lack of a functioning carrier in Russian hands, these days?

The Russians can’t even keep a fucking drydock afloat; they nearly sunk the Admiral Kuznetsov when that went down, and only by the grace of a humorous God did they not lose the carrier–Which they recently set on fire.

The Russians ain’t pulling off no Pearl Harbor attack. You want to posit a realistic threat to world welfare coming off the Russians, you’d best be thinking more along the lines of Chernobyl or what happened at Sayano-Shushenskaya, where Russian competence managed to create the conditions for a hydroelectric dam to catastrophically self-disassemble it’s turbine hall.

Russia is not going to ever pull off something like Pearl Harbor or the Port Arthur attacks. They lack the essential competence to do anything like that, down where it matters, where you have to have a thousand different guys operating in unity and competence. You want a metaphor for Russia, look no further than Tsushima, Chernobyl, or that piece of shit they swindled the Indians into buying. The only thing that allows the Russians to win their wars is their massive capacity to suffer, which they have to have due to their own incompetence and essential inability to cope with anything requiring self-discipline and self-respect. I love Russians, but I hate their culture of self-destruction; WWII should never have happened the way it did, but the pathologies of the Russian soul made it the charnel house it was. It’s unimaginable that any other nation would have tolerated the crap Stalin put them through, but there you are: Russian self-abuse always wins. It’s pathologic, and entirely disturbing to anyone with the remotest respect for human dignity and self-respect. You observe the Russian in their native habitat, and you almost have to conclude that they’re natural serfs, unable to break the mental chains first laid on them by the Tatars and then the Tsars. As such, they’ll never break free and become the competent self-actuating agents that the fantastic ideas of this piece would require. There are reasons that the Soviet air defense network was configured the way it was, with massive investment and reliance on ground control: They couldn’t trust the pilots to act in accordance with the intent of the commanders.

Compare and contrast the aerial war against ground targets in the East, and then in the West, during WWII: You simply did not see the Soviets doing what the US and British air forces did, with massive self-organized and flexible air-ground operations. When the Soviets went up, it was all to a plan, with little recognition that the plan fails once it contacts reality. You won’t find the massively effective fighter sweeps that destroyed the German railway system happening in the East, and the reason is that the Soviets did not and could not trust their men to have initiative or freedom of operation.

It’s also why Socialism resonates so strongly with the Russians; being natural slaves, they are more comfortable in that sort of system than in one where they have to fend for themselves. They want Daddy to take care of them, always and forever, and are perfectly willing to submit to the knout in order to achieve that state.