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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   21596 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 13, 2026

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Fortunately the Soviets could mostly only copy and not innovate like China can.

This is a minor pet peeve of mine, so please forgive the digression (your post as a general rule I agree with).

The Soviets actually, from what I can tell, were quite innovative, and beat US and Western countries to technological "firsts" repeatedly, even though they were often behind in important, even critical, areas (particularly in electronics and computing). Part of their innovation had to do with engineering around their inferior tech base.

A few examples of Soviet innovation and "firsts":

  • The world's first operational Active Protection System for tanks (Drozd, created in the 1970s and used in the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.)
  • Supercavitating torpedoes (to my knowledge, again, the first operational system.)
  • Networked antiship missiles with swarm attack logic (the P-500 went into service in 1975, before the Harpoon, which to my knowledge did not have this capability, although the US can hold its cards very close to the chest.)
  • First electronically scanned array in a fighter aircraft (the Zaslon in the MiG-31.)
  • Titanium-hulled submarines.
  • Crew automation: the Alfa-class submarine, in service 1971, reduced the number of crew down to 31, compared to the Los Angeles class with a crew of more than one hundred and thirty). To be fair, the Los Angeles ships are much larger than the Alfas, but even larger submarines like the Akula class have fewer than 100 crew members, while the newer Virginia class still has roughly the same crew as the Los Angeles class.

Some of these are due to philosophical and/or doctrinal differences - for instance, the Soviet emphasis on antiship missiles was developed as a counter to the carrier battle group; the US saw submarines and aircraft as their ship-killers. Or, to use another examples, tank autoloaders have serious drawbacks compared to hand-loading (particularly, as I understand it, in earlier iterations of the tech). My point here isn't about Soviet technological superiority (there were some areas where they were ahead, of course) but rather about the fact that their difference in circumstance led them to develop doctrines and weapons systems that were often vastly different and divergent from Western designs, instead of being copies.

True, they sort of could innovate. Soviets were a capable technological opponent, the T-64 was far ahead of contemporary tanks and they made good use of what they had. But they were usually behind and only rarely ahead, there was no general trend of them creeping forward in all these domains, only occasional exceptions to the general rule. Soviet goods were also very uncompetitive on world markets, it was mostly just natural resources that they could export.

I was mostly thinking about electronics and chips where they had this excellent espionage system that secured all these chips and blueprints but never really got around to domestic R&D and quality production, usually they just copied and that kept them behind. Soviet innovation was not like Chinese innovation. China is not restricted to the most godawful cars and leaky refrigerators, televisions that occasionally explode...

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