Hmmm. I understand you're having trouble with that reactor again, Mr. Singh? Don't worry, I'll send you my best repair technician right away!
Posted on 01/12/2008 8:10:58 AM PST by sukhoi-30mki
Ah yes. Charles F. Kettering (the man who is responsible for you being able to start your car among numerous other contributions) attributed his success entirely to luck, then he went on to observe that the harder he worked, the luckier he was...
I wonder what Machiavelli would have had to say about using foreign defense contractors.
Speaking broadly, Russian engineers and inventors are geniuses individually.
Working in teams, less so. Getting teams to work with other design/production teams, even less.
Getting those project groups to work with the bureaucracies that fund them, the salesmen who hype their wares, and the grunts in the field who use the finished product, even less still.
The Russkies put up Sputnik because of one man. The Russkies have the AK-47 because of one man.
Getting away from the “one man” does it concept, however, proves increasingly problematic for them.
But if you have one Russian programmer doing some software for you...it’ll work just fine. Or if you have one Russian engineer designing a single mechanism...it’ll work just fine. Or one Russian playing you in chess (Xoroshow!).
Obviously there will be exceptions to the above, but that’s the prevailing stereotype.
And hey, the rest of the world all thinks that we Americans are all fat, lazy, spoiled, rude, arrogant, idiots...so stereotypes cut both ways. Gotta be careful putting too much faith in them.
What else did kalashnikov invent? What major improvement was made. Browning created the underlying principal, the STG44 was the direct anticedent. Kalashnikov made it cheap enough to produce. Even the 7.62x39mm cartridge that is used in the 47 is of German origin.
I have an SKS and I find it too heavy and too underpowered. I imagine the AK is the same. It’s greatest asset is that the Russians made a lot of them.
Well they did make that soft landing on the moon many years ago. (Oh, the ship was going 500 miles an hour when it hit? Never mind.
A 28 year old Sargent invents something that changes the entire world, and that isn't enough for you?
Tough crowd!
Kalashnikov made it cheap enough to produce.
Hello? THAT is the whole point! It's cheap, reliable, simple, rugged, and easy to use and repair. What's not to like?
Remember the story about the defective Russian tanks?
http://frontierindia.net/t-90-s-is-a-dud-it-cant-fire-far-enough/
The Indians must be getting really ticked off at the Ruskis by now....:^)
ping
Thanks for the ping, but I had already read the thread!
:^)
Also designed the second version of the first generation of cruise missiles during WWI. The US Navy started on the first, and the US Army hired Kettering to build one for them.
A mini-bi-plane affair, that counted the number of engine revolutions to decide when to cut the engine and crash with its "bomb" load.
The AK is great because it was the vision of one man. It wasn’t the result of a committee and it wasn’t the result of reverse engineering another country’s innovations.
Um, the US did have that Mars (polar?) lander that did somewhat the same thing. And more recently, there was the Genesis mission that had the gravity sensors installed upside down, so the parachutes never deployed.
Calvin, lighten up. It’s Saturday.
Click on pic for past Navair pings.
Post or FReepmail me if you wish to be enlisted in or discharged from the Navair Pinglist.
This is a medium to low volume pinglist.
http://www.bharat-rakshak.com/NAVY/Klub.html
It doesn’t look like this thing has any of the goodies found in Western systems other than a GLONASS reciever,which is no good till the Russians put the entire constellation up.The Klub seems to be primarily a post-cold war export ‘One size fits all’ system with mimimum frills.
Looks like Russian tech. keeps us safe. Keep on exporting russia. We need you.
>>It was a stolen German concept.<<
So, you’re saying that, in this instance, their German scientists were better than our German scientists?
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