The time when the Soviet Union reverse-engineered a B-29.
September 26, 2015 4:28 PM   Subscribe

How difficult would it be to take apart this airplane and use it to manufacture this airplane?

Very difficult.
posted by dfm500 (39 comments total) 31 users marked this as a favorite
 
Using an English dictionary, he and a group of technicians made a detailed inspection of the Superfortress, re-labeling each switch and system.

Which really underscores the crucial difference between "altitude" and "amplitude."
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 4:34 PM on September 26, 2015 [6 favorites]


How difficult would it be to take apart this airplane and use it to manufacture this airplane?

I feel like if this were made into a movie, it would be a kind of cold war era Flight of the Phoenix.
posted by Fizz at 5:34 PM on September 26, 2015




Western observers of the Soviet Union's military efforts, including many historians I've talked to, often have this patronising attitude about Soviet technology development. "They were way behind us." "They had to copy us because they couldn't do it themselves."

This is a perception of 'imitativeness', a stock idea that Westerners have long had about people they consider 'eastern', and one that we also encounter in Western military writers about Japan from earlier in the twentieth century. Here's the (otherwise) great Fred T Jane writing about the Japanese navy in 1904: "They cannot originate, but they are peerless at practising the things that they have learnt." (The Imperial Japanese Navy, p. 301)

It's racism, obviously: a very comforting racism that allows us to maintain our self perception of superiority in the face of technological brilliance from people we want to look down on. In the early c20, Westerners felt uneasy about the evident technical skill of the Japanese. In the Cold War, they felt the same about the Soviets. In each case, they came up with the same soothing narrative about imitativeness.

Of course, we all know about the technological sophistication of the Japanese, and we all should know about the many technical triumphs of the Soviet military establishment. I study navies, where the Soviets were the first to figure out how to launch cruise missiles from tubes (meaning they could carry them on ships) were the first to build a sodium-cooled reactor, were the only people ever (to my knowledge) to make a titanium-hulled submarine. Think about that: you can't cast titanium - titanium has to be milled. They milled the hull of an entire submarine!

Ironically, in many ways, Western military development schemes were more 'imitative' than the Soviet ones. Look at the Tomahawk cruise missile, sometime. It's basically a direct descendent of the German V-1 bomb. All through the early Cold War, the Americans were continually predicting that the Soviets would build copies of the V-1. Why? Because that's what the Americans were doing. But the Soviets were moving ahead with completely new, much better, designs which somehow never got brought up when the Americans were accusing them of imitativeness.

So why am I saying all this? Because when I make these arguments, the thing that always gets thrown back in my face is the B-59/Tu-4. "They even copied the interior paint scheme!", I'm told, the implication being that they were so slavish in their imitation that they didn't know what components were or were not important. From the article:
"Many myths have arisen in the West about how the Soviets built the Tu-4. Over the decades stories have circulated that the B-29 was copied in exacting and often ludicrous ways. These tales suggest that Tupolev and his team mindlessly replicated every aspect of the Boeing design. As noted, Tupolev did approve the precise copying of such details as a fuselage patch and the exact hue of the interior paint scheme found on Ramp Tramp. ... All these minor details in copying, according to Kerber, were a way to prevent Beria’s police from accusing the Tupolev team of ignoring Stalin’s precise instructions. No one wanted to risk arrest."
And in one stroke that central plank of the imitativeness argument shatters into a thousand noxious splinters.

Thanks dfm500! I didn't know about this article (and the book it's based on). You really made my day.
posted by Dreadnought at 6:33 PM on September 26, 2015 [98 favorites]


Fantastic post, thanks for sharing this!

All through the early Cold War, the Americans were continually predicting that the Soviets would build copies of the V-1. Why? Because that's what the Americans were doing. But the Soviets were moving ahead with completely new, much better, designs which somehow never got brought up when the Americans were accusing them of imitativeness.

In the 90s, American firms made a killing by buying up old unused Soviet closed-cycle rocket engines. American engines up to that point had all been open-cycle (which is much less efficient) because closed-cycle had been thought impossible to make practicable. The Soviet engines that brought the tech to the 'first world' were decades old at this point.
posted by Dysk at 6:42 PM on September 26, 2015 [1 favorite]


China is doing the same thing with the F-35 and F-22

Well, good luck to them; maybe China can make it work.
posted by xedrik at 6:53 PM on September 26, 2015 [20 favorites]


There's also Lunokhod →‎ Mars Pathfinder.
posted by XMLicious at 6:55 PM on September 26, 2015


I find the reverse engineering thing to be fascinating. It takes a very dedicated and detail oriented team to be able to do that kind of work, and I feel like it's often more work than designing from scratch.

For the plane I do a lot of work on, Boeing did the original design. Due to the nature of defense contracting, there are times when we do modifications that don't include Boeing. The contractors we do hire have to do a lot of reverse engineering to make sure their systems won't make the plane unsafe to fly. Boeing doesn't help, because the govern,net didn't put them on contract so they will usually refuse to sell design data to the othe contractors. It's an interesting problem that could be easily solved by having the government buy the design data outright, but of course there's never enough money for that.

I'm reminded of two things by this article. First, another story I heard somewhere of Soviet spies stealing American technology. They posed as potential customers for a company developing parts for, I think, nuclear bombs. They toured the machine shop, saw the works, and left. No one saw anything suspicious. What they were after, though, were samples of the alloys that were being worked on the shop - they had worn shoes with squishy rubber soles and made sure to step on the filings around the metal working machines to embed them in their shoes.

Second, a coworker at my last job kept a copy of a requirements document for a World War 2 vintage aircraft hung on his wall. It contained the requirements from congress to the aircraft manufacturer for a medium-range cargo craft. The whole document was one page long. It's a stark contrast to the complexity we've built in to our systems nowadays.
posted by backseatpilot at 6:57 PM on September 26, 2015 [12 favorites]


What I want to know is why it's taking them so long to reverse engineer that saucer they've got bundled up in Area 51.
posted by TDavis at 7:43 PM on September 26, 2015 [1 favorite]


China is doing the same thing with the F-35 and F-22

What if the F-35 was devised solely to waste the time and money of foreign countries who decided to replicate it? Given its reputation, that might explain a lot of things.
posted by acb at 8:06 PM on September 26, 2015 [19 favorites]


Trick question, it was designed as a stealth subsidy to funnel endless money into the defense complex...which might be the exact same thing, actually, now that you mention it.
posted by T.D. Strange at 8:10 PM on September 26, 2015 [5 favorites]


Vaporware: the perfect DRM solution. Except in Galaxy Quest.
posted by XMLicious at 8:20 PM on September 26, 2015 [2 favorites]


Think about that: you can't cast titanium - titanium has to be milled. They milled the hull of an entire submarine!

There's probably a reason why no other "people" has ever milled an entire submarine hull out of titanium. I wonder what it might be.
posted by carping demon at 10:49 PM on September 26, 2015


The Soviets also copied the Concorde and the space shuttle. To their credit, they abandoned both of these projects fairly early on, unlike the West, which poured good money into these expensive and impractical albatrosses for 30 years apiece.
posted by chrchr at 11:05 PM on September 26, 2015 [3 favorites]


There are indications that the Chinese are keeping mostly the good parts of the F35 design and redesigning the rest to suit their needs. I.e. they have copied the general shape of the aircraft, putting to good use the thousands upon thousands of hours spent in design, modelling, wind tunnel tests and flight tests which they paid nothing for. On the other hand they've ditched the STOVL capability and others stemming from the fact that the F35 has a requirements list which is the grand total of everything three services could dream up.
posted by Harald74 at 11:13 PM on September 26, 2015 [4 favorites]


I believe the metallic swarf story originates with Rolls-Royce - I've certainly seen a documentary that mentioned it & included interviews with the Soviets who did the deed.
posted by pharm at 1:44 AM on September 27, 2015


Priceless: "the nickname “Ramp Tramp” puzzled many Soviet pilots and engineers, even those familiar with English. One rough translation offered was “Unshaven Vagabond,” which still baffled Soviet airmen."
posted by peeedro at 5:09 AM on September 27, 2015


Vintage General Electric video explaining the operation of B-29 central station fire control system.
posted by peeedro at 5:39 AM on September 27, 2015 [1 favorite]


Backseatpilot, do you happen to remember which aircraft's requirements your coworker had on his wall? I'd be interested to see them (and they might be good mojo for my workplace as well).
posted by Songdog at 6:32 AM on September 27, 2015 [1 favorite]


> China is doing the same thing with the F-35 and F-22

As soon as they appear on aliexpress I'm so ordering one.
posted by Artful Codger at 7:03 AM on September 27, 2015 [7 favorites]


Very interesting. Minor note:
Think about that: you can't cast titanium - titanium has to be milled. They milled the hull of an entire submarine!

This I don't quite follow. My understanding is one builds a submarine by rolling plate steel, not casting it in place. I assume one could use the same general concept for titanium.

Also a cautionary note about copying the "good parts" of the F-35: the danger of reverse engineering is that you don't always know what the good parts are. Take Buran, one could say they copied all the difficult aerodynamics from the shuttle, which means a big wing. But the big wing of the shuttle was really only a relic of a very specific mission design, the once-around polar flight from Vandenberg that demanded high cross range capability. Presumably they did not need this (odd, never flown) mission, but they're stuck with its design. So given the complex F-35 requirements list, it wouldn't surprise me at all if a copy ended up with similar mismatches even though (and likely because) they look similar.
posted by kiltedtaco at 9:12 AM on September 27, 2015 [2 favorites]


The reverse engineering efforts were demanded from the very top, Beria and Stalin. Beria particularly was adamant that all Soviet effort go into copying tried and true items, because real R&D involved uncertainty, and possible time and resource waste through failure. Richard Rhodes' "Dark Sun" is good on how this approach applied to the Russian nuclear research program following Hiroshima and Nagisaki.
posted by hwestiii at 9:30 AM on September 27, 2015 [2 favorites]


There's probably a reason why no other "people" has ever milled an entire submarine hull out of titanium. I wonder what it might be.

They didn't want a 40+ knot deep-diving attack sub?
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 9:54 AM on September 27, 2015 [3 favorites]


"But for Soviet agents, infiltrating the Concorde factory in France proved much more successful. The French intelligence service, known as the DST, never saw them coming."
posted by clavdivs at 10:07 AM on September 27, 2015


The Soviet Union used the metric system, thus sheet aluminum in thicknesses matching the B-29's imperial measurements were unavailable. The corresponding metric-gauge metal was of different thicknesses.
So this anti-metric-system bias in the US was actually a cold war strategy!
posted by MtDewd at 11:01 AM on September 27, 2015 [2 favorites]


There's probably a reason why no other "people" has ever milled an entire submarine hull out of titanium. I wonder what it might be.

They didn't want a 40+ knot deep-diving attack sub?


The sub in question was the Alfa. NATO countries just didn't have the same Cold War mission -- they didn't need to stop cross-Atlantic resupply of Europe, which would require many, many fast-attack subs.

The Soviets apparently made only seven Alfa subs. Too expensive.

Interesting, what I just learned -- the Alfa was powered by a nuclear reactor cooled by molten lead. Holy fuck, Ivan.
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 11:37 AM on September 27, 2015 [7 favorites]


Cool Papa Bell: I know why you're saying that, about 705/Alfas, but it might not be true. Recent scholarship is overturning the view that the Soviets were planning to attack North Atlantic sea lines of communication in force. Rather, they were preparing to fight a war for control of the sea areas of the Arctic and sub-Arctic -- 705/Alfas were supposed to fight in that environment, where they needed to outperform Western submarines without, necessarily, existing in great numbers.

I know that might sound strange to somebody educated in the Western tradition of naval warfare, but it seems to have been the case. If you're interested, I wrote a longer comment that goes into some depth on the issue, April before last.
posted by Dreadnought at 12:53 PM on September 27, 2015 [4 favorites]


Who says titanium cannot be cast? Turbine compressor (but not hot section) blades, Boeing gear legs, jewelry and even a custom motorcycle frame are all cast in titanium. It is usually investment cast, most often lost wax, with graphite molds and under a vacuum because Ti is so fiercely reactive but there are lots and lots of specialty foundries that cast with titanium and the majority of them cater to aerospace.
posted by bz at 1:36 PM on September 27, 2015 [2 favorites]


There are indications that the Chinese are keeping mostly the good parts of the F35 design and redesigning the rest to suit their needs. I.e. they have copied the general shape of the aircraft, putting to good use the thousands upon thousands of hours spent in design, modelling, wind tunnel tests and flight tests which they paid nothing for.

If they copy "good parts" while changing the design and then don't run their own aero models, wind tunnel studies and flight tests, they're way dumber than I give them credit for.
posted by indubitable at 2:10 PM on September 27, 2015


Who says they aren't, though? On the other hand, by not exactly mimicking the f-35 design, they're improving on a lot of its weak points. For instance, the dual engine layout means they have redundancy that the JSF lacks. Not to mention that without the massive hump behind the cockpit, there's rear canopy visibility.

There were similar edits in the Buran design as well. For instance, they subtracted the orbiter main engines, increasing the payload capacity. Of course, the USSR ran out of funding for it before they could ever make much use of it, but in a lot of these instances of "copying," the original design gets refined as well.
posted by cobra_high_tigers at 2:45 PM on September 27, 2015 [1 favorite]


Subtracting engines does not put more mass into space. Buran had engines on what we would think of as the "external tank" rather than the orbiter, but since this was the last stage, it doesn't change the ascent performance.
posted by kiltedtaco at 3:18 PM on September 27, 2015


For instance, the dual engine layout means they have redundancy more weight that the JSF lacks already has too much of. (tradeoff may make sense if Chinese engines are super shitty, though). Can they replicate the fabrication technology used? No? Then they need to redesign the structure into something that they can build, then figure out how to deal with the greater weight. Getting harder to see where the savings are in reverse-engineering someone else's completed design.

Also, this only makes sense if China's mission needs match those of the US. The USSR's copying of the B-29 made sense because they also needed long range strategic bombers for nuclear strike. If the F-35 is a poor match for China's mission needs, they might be better off starting from a clean sheet or evolving one of their existing designs.
posted by indubitable at 3:20 PM on September 27, 2015




Subtracting engines does not put more mass into space.

That's true as you stated it, but that isn't quite what I was referring to. The Shuttle orbiter's main engines and the components necessary to support them took up a significant amount of space at the aft of the orbiter body. (See for instance this blueprint.) In the Buran orbiter with similar external dimensions, that volume was just used for additional cargo bay volume. The Energia stack designed to lift Buran into orbit was significantly more powerful than the STS stack - more than enough power to make up the difference. As a result, the Buran could not only carry a larger volume of cargo than the Shuttle, but thanks to its Energia, it could carry more mass into LEO as well - 30,000kg vs. 24,400kg.

For instance, the dual engine layout means they have redundancy more weight that the JSF lacks already has too much of.

Your point about weight is well-taken, but let me add two things to consider:
1. It may not apply to the J-31 just because it does to the F-35, or at least to the same degree. The F-35 has "too much weight" in part because of how much drag it generates, which is a function of its shape, which is noticeably chubby due to the bulky lift fan assembly necessary to meet the F-35B's STOVL capability requirement, which in turn afflicts the -A and -C models as well thanks to the requirement for platform-sharing/commonality. (That was a picture of an -A and the thing barely tapers from the top of of the canopy to the engine nozzle FFS.) The J-31 has a visibly slimmer profile, and presumably different aerodynamic characteristics to match. Not to mention that there are likely weight reduction benefits that accrue from its smaller size. And of course we have no idea what it's made out of either, or any number of other factors that would affect its weight.
2. The engine redundancy issue is pretty important for a lot of people. The single-engine YF-16 beat the dual engine (and F/A-18 predecessor) YF-17 on the merits in the US Navy's Lightweight Fighter competition, but the Navy rejected it anyway because they wanted a dual-engine plane. And although Canada was an early investor in the JSF program, it hasn't yet decided whether to actually purchase any yet given concerns over the price and its relative disadvantages compared to other options, including its lack of a second engine. Anyway, dual-engine redundancy is generally considered more important for planes that will be spending a lot of time over the water... which China's military may have in mind, given the ongoing disputes in the East and South China Seas.
posted by cobra_high_tigers at 7:13 PM on September 27, 2015 [1 favorite]


If the F-35 is a poor match for China's mission needs, they might be better off starting from a clean sheet or evolving one of their existing designs.

The mission may just be make one or two prototypes so that China can say "Hey look, not only did we copy your most advanced fighter, but we also improved it so that it works. It could solely be a propaganda move.

If you're interested, I wrote a longer comment that goes into some depth on the issue, April before last.

That is such a great comment. Thank you for back linking and all of your contributions in this thread Dreadnought. I find this kind of stuff super interesting and your knowledge is greatly appreciated!
posted by mayonnaises at 7:53 AM on September 28, 2015


It's racism, obviously: a very comforting racism that allows us to maintain our self perception of superiority in the face of technological brilliance from people we want to look down on. In the early c20, Westerners felt uneasy about the evident technical skill of the Japanese. In the Cold War, they felt the same about the Soviets. In each case, they came up with the same soothing narrative about imitativeness.

Note, though, that this myth was not unique to Westerners. The story of the copied B-29 was also a part of the folklore of the Soviet intelligentsia. It is recounted, for instance, in Mikhail Veller's "Legends of Nevsky Prospect", a collection of tales he's heard in his youth in Leningrad. He, too, focusses on the lengths the Soviet engineers supposedly went to in imitating the design of the American bomber, down to a mysterious small hole drilled in one of the wings and the half-finished interior paint job. He then goes on to state that the reason they did this was because they simply didn't understand what they were copying (which is obviously absurd).

There are several possible explanations to this perception. On one hand, this narrative is a part of the general dissident/opposition narrative where everything Soviet = bad. On the other hand, though, it may have also served as a simple explanation to why things were the way they were in everyday life - why the design of everyday items remained the same for decades, why they tended to break down all the time. "Your kettle is broken again? Did I ever tell you the story of how they built the Tu-4..."
posted by daniel_charms at 8:46 AM on September 28, 2015


I'm reminded of two things by this article. First, another story I heard somewhere of Soviet spies stealing American technology. They posed as potential customers for a company developing parts for, I think, nuclear bombs. They toured the machine shop, saw the works, and left. No one saw anything suspicious. What they were after, though, were samples of the alloys that were being worked on the shop - they had worn shoes with squishy rubber soles and made sure to step on the filings around the metal working machines to embed them in their shoes.

You sure you're not just thinking of an episode of The Americans?
posted by entropone at 9:52 AM on September 28, 2015 [2 favorites]


Nice post, thanks for bringing it.
posted by Daddy-O at 11:54 AM on September 28, 2015


So this anti-metric-system bias in the US was actually a cold war strategy!

It was the American equivalent of the USSR's base -2 computers.
posted by acb at 5:53 PM on September 28, 2015


« Older Recent Windows update breaks SafeDisc DRM   |   "The other funny thing was that he kept adjusting... Newer »


This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments