Electronic avionics evolution

[mig29]

As we all know defense projects are highly classified and secret. But we find too much similarity between the electronic avionics developed by the Americans and the Russians (Erstwhile USSR). I wonder how is this similarity possible? Did they know all the theoretical knowledge way before the development and were only restricted by the technology available in that period? Or the similarity exists due to the cold war espionage?

 

Some of the Similarities are listed below:

 

1) Use of Radio Frequency in tracking targets.

2) Use of Pulsed Radar for painting targets.

3) Energy concentration in STT mode.

4) Switching to continuous wave Radar to guide missiles.

5) Guidance mechanism of Radar guided missiles.

Etc. etc.

[combatace]

As we all know defense projects are highly classified and secret. But we find too much similarity between the electronic avionics developed by the Americans and the Russians (Erstwhile USSR). I wonder how is this similarity possible? Did they know all the theoretical knowledge way before the development and were only restricted by the technology available in that period? Or the similarity exists due to the cold war espionage?

 

Some of the Similarities are listed below:

 

1) Use of Radio Frequency in tracking targets.

2) Use of Pulsed Radar for painting targets.

3) Energy concentration in STT mode.

4) Switching to continuous wave Radar to guide missiles.

5) Guidance mechanism of Radar guided missiles.

Etc. etc.

 

Radar was first developed in UK AFAIK during WW2 and was shared to both as being on same side. And as far as many things like guns, wing designs, rockets and many many more things were stolen from Germany where research was done in Hilter's era.

Edited October 11, 2010 by combatace

[vanir]

It's a combination of the two, mig29. Technology is largely funded by more generalised or unrelated scientific studies and projects, combined with the industrial projects being funded at the time in the given nation.

 

Everybody knew about radar in the 30s, but only Britain was making headway with small wavelengths and they were keeping that little piece of information top secret. Germany assumed small wavelength AI-radar was years away from development and relied largely on AAA-defence, other countries inhibited their industrial application of technology because of extreme conservatism in the military, shutting down development projects because of cost and spending the money building more ships or fortifications, or different technologies like advanced metallurgies.

 

Most of the role of military Intelligence is in figuring out exactly what industries are being funded and what is being developed by the enemy rather than trying to steal it. It's also as much about counter-technologies than it is technology-equivalence.

Industrial espionage is more about a race to the finish line than how to run the race.

 

The most infamous example of genuine technological disparity in any recent time that wasn't just propaganda was the MiG Foxbat and it turned out to be a paranoid myth caused by US defence overspending.

So pretty much at no time has there ever been any genuine technological disparity in terms of information awareness in any recent history all the way back to the Hundred Years War.

It's just been a question of what your industry is producing and what you have immediate access to.

 

It's the golden egg and the subject of political thrillers and much propaganda to actually have some technological Intelligence superiority than potential enemies, but it is fiction. Even if they don't know the specific details of a defence system or technology you're using, they know the physics it is depending on to work in the first place and could emulate it by trial and error in the very worst case scenario, but even this is rarely the case.

 

Usually it's just about expenditure and present industry.

[vanir]

The jet engine is a great example, being completely independently developed in Germany and England at roughly the same time. Germany got it in the air first because of government sponsorship.

 

The roads to the development of the Whittle engine and the German ones were completely different. Whittle originally conceived of just a specialised high altitude piston engine, but the supercharger system eventually outgrew the piston engine and he had an epiphany, doing away with the piston engine completely.

The German development concentrated on the hot area turbine replacing a piston engine from the very beginning (mind you even this was because the government was sponsoring several advanced engine projects, a concurrant one was using a piston engine to drive a massive supercharger stage that in turn fed two more supercharged engines that actually provided thrust, so this was all largely from a case of German defence overspending on several projects that gave such speed in jet development).

 

The common catalyst here was the increasing capabilities of piston engine aircraft, the turbine engine was simply a natural evolutionary path anyone was bound to stumble upon one way or another, eventually and independently, once the environment for it existed.

Edited October 11, 2010 by vanir

[combatace]

Whatever I wrote was read from somewhere by me or seen on discovery channel. Ak-47 as well as M-16 both use German concept. Various jet wings are inheritance of German research 'stolen after war'.

[SgtPappy]

Nice write-up Vanir.

 

Strangely enough, Whittle's "centrifugal flow" jet engine was used in the Russian MiG jets later in the war while the U.S. opted to use von Ohain's concept of the axial-flow turbine which has evolved into the turbofan/shaft/prop engines we use today.

[Boberro]

One side copied from other. This is one of the reason spies exist. Many things USSR copied from NATO during Cold War.

[mig29]

@vanir: That was a very nice piece of text I must say.

 

So I come to know that much data was taken from Germany. Are the Germans some super advanced species? :)

[vanir]

Well it was really a case of speeding up development projects rather than stealing technology.

 

With say, Russia's jet technology. At the very end of the war they had independently arrived at where Whittle was just before the war. Early Soviet indigenous jet development were piston engine planes fitted with rockets in the tail assembly for speed boosting.

 

They developed a rocket powered interceptor not unlike the Me-163 back in 1941 and fitted ramjet engines to the wings of one prototype, testing that concept but ramjets require significant airspeed before they start working, so could only ever be a supplementary engine.

 

They also prototyped a new fighter concept not unlike an unsuccessful Italian design, which was essentially a piston engine plane driving a hot area turbine in the tail for additional thrust, this airframe achieved speeds in excess of 700km/h during 1945 I believe, which was at the very least equivalent of the very latest front line fighters and not bad at all for any initial prototype (compare for example the Bell Airacomet's performance, well below contemporary piston fighters).

 

Of course stumbling your way through a technology development independently, like all pioneers do takes time and resources, and a little bit of luck along the way. It is simply quicker and less expensive or troublesome to plagiarise.

In 1945 the Russians were in the fortuitous position of actually occupying much of the areas of German special projects actual production sites, which were mostly east and northeast of Berlin. The allies tended to occupy much of the administrative and development centres for this industry, which was mostly west and southwest of Berlin.

 

So as it turned out, in generalised terms the Russians got most of the surplus jet engines, BMW and Jumo, whilst western allies, particularly British and Americans got most of the design blueprints and plans for them, speaking very loosely here. Actual scientists were all over the place, a few more to the west but there were POW exchanges with the Soviets anyway, certain individuals traded for some surplus engines, scientists traded for Intelligence personnel and so on.

It is no exaggeration that Germany became like a great big warehouse sale but it wasn't over "secret technologies" so much as Germany had overspent on defence through the 30s-40s to such an extent that their progress could simply save a lot of money and extra time for the very same projects other nations had been working on.

 

So the Russians slotted Jumo engines into existing airframes, the Yak-3 to produce the Yak-15 jet fighter for example. They literally just bolted the German engine to them, but they did also trade some prisoners for design blueprints from the Americans and began remanufacturing them with more reliable peacetime component materials.

They did the same thing with BMW engines and the MiG-9 jet interceptor, which was the first traditional jet fighter design and forerunner of the MiG-15. Actually I think it was the BMW engines they got the blueprints for and the Jumos were reverse-engineered.

 

British and American jet engines were already developing at an accelerating pace with the Vampire and Shooting Star jet fighters but the British were becoming concerned about the US leaving behind all other nations with its combined industrial strength and technologies, they didn't feel comfortable about having a single superpower controlling world politics, aside from Churchill himself who was no longer in office they weren't as diametric to the Soviets as the Americans were becoming, so they made a decision to have limited technology sharing with the USSR.

They gave them a few examples of their latest centrifugal engine for technology development but weren't entirely expecting the Soviets to start unlicensed production in short order, which they fitted to their new MiG-15 airframe.

 

So again what we see mostly is really about timespans of development projects, expenditure in particular roads of development, but the base science of the projects is always common knowledge.

Industrial espionage is again, more about a race to the finish line than how to run the race. The Soviets would've had MiG-15s in the air in 1947-48 whatever happened, but instead of a centrifugal rolls royce based engine it might've had a more developed version of the axial Jumo with associated performance differences.

The Jumo had been undergoing continual redevelopment in the Yak-series, which were already up to the Yak-17 and 19 versions and it was becoming quite a powerful engine. It just didn't have the performance of the rolls royce at high altitude back then, but soon afterwards Soviet axial flow turbojets would overshadow the centrifugal types just like they did in the west, and it was undoubtedly the Jumo and BMW redevelopments which led to the mighty Soyuz-Tumanskies of the 1960s.

[Moa]

Radar was first developed in UK AFAIK during WW2 and was shared to both as being on same side. And as far as many things like guns, wing designs, rockets and many many more things were stolen from Germany where research was done in Hilter's era.

 

Radar predates WWII, although it wasn't until 1940 that the term 'radar' was coined. It was just the UK used it effectively (from 1939 onwards), although many countries were working on it (eg. New Zealand's Ernest Marsden was an early leader and added radar to the HMS Achilles [nominally Royal Navy but pretty much a NZ vessel]).

 

The US also had radar operating at the time of the Pearl Harbour attack (end of 1941) but the contacts were misidentified as friendlies.

[Moa]

@vanir: That was a very nice piece of text I must say.

 

So I come to know that much data was taken from Germany. Are the Germans some super advanced species? :)

 

Their scientists were very good. Perhaps there was something cultural with thoroughness and discipline, yet open questions were permitted (unlike some other cultures). They had good universities and good funding (especially for projects with military applications), and a concentration of scientists that could easily interact with each other and nearby industry (chemistry, metallurgy, weaponry, quantum physics, etc).

 

Much of the innovations in transport and technology came from (or were made practicle by) German researchers in the first half of the twentieth century (the tank [although the Germans failed to exploit it in WWI], cruise missile [V1], ballistic missile [v2], jet fighters and bombers, flying wing, dirigible, armed aircraft with weapon synchronization, guided missile, rocket fighters, early programmable computer).

[vanir]

I should reiterate science and technology isn't a national or cultural phenomenon, although the implementation of given technologies can be very political.

 

Aside from a little pride in some quarters of Brandenburg's astronomical history, which is really no different to London there is no genuine difference between a German and a Frenchman or anyone else. If anything the oppressive undercurrent of rising nationalism throughout the 30s inhibited rather than promoted scientific developments.

 

(and it was the British who invented the tank btw, the name tank was given to conceal the wartime project as being something to do with water tanks)

 

The single greatest factor in promoting technological developments in Nazi Germany would be defence spending. Goering's "five year economic plan" was a colloquial for committing the nation to war, so defence spending consisted of promising three times more in funding that was actually available in raw materials, let alone purchasing power.

In the wake of the Great Depression, quite simply no other nation could afford to keep up with Germany, Germany couldn't afford to keep up with Germany.

 

Individual companies like Krupp and Rheinmetall were very experienced with cutting edge munitions industry, even so no particular technological superiority over Bofors, Sköda or British Royal Ordnance factories whom also built excellent machinery. Meanwhile several Soviet field weapons were considered the best in the world.

 

The Nazis were more prepared to place very experimental technologies in the field, the V-1 was quite an achievement but the V-2 was a research project that represented psychological impact far more than effect, it was a dice roll to assume it would hit anywhere near a target region but it represented the future in a stark and impressive manner. Other projects like the revolver-cannon became the postwar Aden and DEFA guns, virtually direct copies of the design. Wire guided and other seeker missiles were being used in service by war's end. But some stupid ideas like Sonic-cannon AAA were also funded with ridiculous amounts of money that was desperately needed elsewhere.

 

In part it was Germany's willingness to fund every crazy new project which helped bring them down, they had way too many loaves baking in the oven instead of just concentrating on a few achievable objectives, consolidating resources and then tabling a new series of objectives.

 

So they weren't more advanced, just taking on a great deal more than other nations were willing to by compromising their own war making potential.

[combatace]

Espionage is also a big reason for similarity in designs or concepts like the nuclear project of USSR, it wasn't developed and lagged US development. Hans stole the copies and transfered them to USSR via UK, but was finally caught after some yaers but was largely due to his confession.

[Moa]

I should reiterate science and technology isn't a national or cultural phenomenon, although the implementation of given technologies can be very political.

 

Not so. The Islamic World was far ahead of the West for a time where insightful questions were allowed to be asked in a tradition called 'ijtihad' IIRC. Once these questions became uncomfortable for the Caliph in Baghdad this questioning was suppressed and has been in that culture ever since. I'm not saying this is 'bad', but instead pointing out that the adoption of a particular culture can stifle or promote large-scale innovation (in contrast, the relative chaos of Western culture promotes individuality ahead of some social cohesion, which leads to many whacky ideas being tested and eventually accepted).

 

While doing my PhD I experienced first hand the cultural phenomenon where a senior Japanese scientist made an error discussing a point (we all do from time to time) and his student clearly knew the mistake but could not correct the senior as this would result in a 'loss of face'. In contrast I would immediately, although diplomatically, state a correction if my own superior was astray. This kind of thing (eg. face-saving, but it could be corruption in a culture of cheating etc) introduces a time-inefficiency in getting things done or arriving at results - although it may be good for their society as a whole. I believe the situation may be relatively similar in China (people will smile and lie to you rather than lose face - and this is perfectly acceptable to them). My point is that different cultures trade off efficiency for harmony, which results in a similar spectrum of smart people being either more innovative (eg. Germans in the early twentieth century) or less (eg. China in the early twentieth century). Clearly this is also a function of industrial base and the integral of reseach funding over time.

 

I disagree with your statement that the Germans weren't remarkable (and I say this living in a British descended Commonwealth country). It was long before the Second World War as well. Simply consider such giants as Heisenberg, Pauli, Schrodinger, Einstein in physics, and a similar horde in chemistry and engineering. There were clever people all over the world, but a great concentration was in Germany at that time. I don't fully understand why, but objectively there is no denying that the Germans were able to come up with a large number of scientific and technological innovations that the rest of the world could match or surpass as an aggregate, but not as individual countries. Again, World War II only used and refined the technologies that German science had been building for decades beforehand.

 

Clearly, in an analogous fashion, the center of the scientific world has moved for the last few decades (post-WWII) to the USA. It may be people from all over the world doing the research, but it is in the USA where this occurs. That is not to say there aren't smart people and cool things done elsewhere, but the barycenter is firmly in the US.

Edited October 13, 2010 by Moa

[vanir]

Gawd. The Islamic world was never far ahead of the west, they maintained a closer connection to Greek scientific roots through the period of tremendous political disruption in the holy roman empire (ie. pretty much the entire time from the 10th to 15th centuries), which contrasts starkly with democratic presumptions the Islamic world was barbaric and scientifically degenerate compared to western intellects, a very popular 19th century eugenics assertion.

 

Pretty much the single piece of technology often cited as an example of parity at the least is the astrolabe, which is a more effective means of sea navigation than was being widely practised in the west at the time, but is really not much different from what the Greeks used, really just a refinement and no cause to level an opposite extreme from intellectual barbarism to abject technological superiority, once again almost always a propaganda fiction.

 

Algebra is an islamic word but it was a chinese invention which reached the west via the silk road, so was first encountered and named in asia minor. Conversely much of asiatic religious science (buddhist, taoist, etc.) is based quite directly on ancient Greek philosophy-science transmitted via the silk road and travelling through asia minor and central asia.

 

Again Islamic medicine was influenced largely by Greek and Chinese practises, where western Europe had largely degenerated through the infamous dark ages, it's actually what gave the dark ages its name, the general academic degeneration of the west from the classical age. Basically Islamic doctors were discovering the medical benefits of locally occuring natural compounds much as the Mesopotamians and Egyptians had, whilst in Holland or Austria they were trying to exorcise illness demons out of patients with clubs and torture. This practise popped up in Belarus with some frequency through the 1990s by the way.

 

The Islamic world at the time simply wasn't subject to the political infighting and corrupt and capitalist grabs for power that dominated western europe and the balkans for the next millennia, reshaping politics and philosophies as it went. At quite the other end of the spectrum much politics and philosophy defined economics and cultural views in the east, its effective scientific stagnancy was beneficial throughout the dark ages but unfortunately there's not a whole lot of difference between certain 12th century Islamic, or Chinese for that matter, active practises then and today. Traditional chinese medicine and Islamic justice systems are completely unchanged since mediaeval times and not much different then to what they were a few thousand years before that.

 

You might say eastern and middle eastern cultural philosophies were quite disciplinarian, which has its benefits whilst western ones by comparison seemed to lack any concept of self discipline, we just make up new religions to suit whatever new piece of greed has become popular, want more wives, make up a new denomination, clergy getting in your way lately, want more land, more powers of state, make up a new denomination, it's what turned christianity into mammon, it's own predicted apocalypse.

 

On the flipside of the coin a Japanese, or Chinese student is hardly concerned with saving anybody's face so much as social conscience, disrupting a class to tell the lecturer they made a mistake isn't necessarily the smartest objective approach, though it may certainly be very competitive. Social competition isn't really an element of eastern political or educational philosophies so much as it satisfies individual egos. Nevertheless Japanese academic standards are very highly regarded in the west, although there is a notable drop in standardised testing results following school years.

 

Italian and Germanic scientific pioneers of the renaissance become fairly obvious when one looks at a simple map of the educational centres of the time, observatories and so forth, and considers political and economic regional climates. Brandenburg was a scientific centre, as was Rome, Paris, London, but there were quite a few observatories around Brandenburg which marks an inherent tradition to follow it on. Even in modern Germany Berliners are regarded as almost a culture unique to themselves.

But the Germanic regions themselves had long since broken up into a series of principalities within states and all sorts of in-fighting between dominant dynasties and minor aristocrats, by the Hundred Years War Germans were notable as brutal mercinaries rather than educated. Shortly following that they fell under the spell of militarism and authoritarian rulership, becoming known as a major industrial power. On the one hand you've got the bickering Reichstag and on the other the domineering Prussians. At the opening of the 20th century the thing Germans were most famous for was selling very good guns to the highest bidder, whilst the French say had equivalent or better weapons but were far more selective about who they gave them to. As for the industrial revolution itself that was a British thing, although people like Krupp and Ford took the ideas of mass production to new heights, one to make consistent cannon barrels and the other to make affordable automobiles.

In military circles the Prussians were very famous for reinventing the concept of command structures, their system was copied with little or no modification by every other power in the world and invented the whole concept of a General Staff, more merchant of death stuff than technological.

 

 

Altogether I'm saying Moa that your views are a reasonable, if subjective generalisation in passing but won't stand up to detailed objective examination at length. They should certainly not become the central theme of any political philosophy or neo-eugenics assertion regarding cultural tendencies. Please take no offence, I sought to demonstrate increasing complication with detail rather than simply taking exception.

Remember also that inventive scientific minds tend to contradict rather than promote regional cultural and political memes for the most part, Galilleo in prison, Kepler's entire first series publication being burned and his presses smashed, etc. They're not really representative of their cultures at the time.

Edited October 13, 2010 by vanir

[hassata]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_Golden_Age

[combatace]

 

Individual companies like Krupp and Rheinmetall were very experienced with cutting edge munitions industry, even so no particular technological superiority over Bofors, Sköda or British Royal Ordnance factories whom also built excellent machinery. Meanwhile several Soviet field weapons were considered the best in the world.

 

 

I guess you don't know that Leopard-2 is the best tank in the world ahead of Abrams and there is no bias review on that. The barrel of Abrams was designed by German company. Can M1 ford 30 feet of water? can it run smooth with no issues in sand, mud??? Can you handle M1 as rough as you can? the answer to that is no.

[nscode]

I guess you don't know that Leopard-2 is not a pre-WWII tank ;)

[RIPTIDE]

I guess you don't know that Leopard-2 is the best tank in the world ahead of Abrams and there is no bias review on that. The barrel of Abrams was designed by German company. Can M1 ford 30 feet of water? can it run smooth with no issues in sand, mud??? Can you handle M1 as rough as you can? the answer to that is no.

Ze Jermans: StRonG!

[vanir]

I guess you don't know that Leopard-2 is the best tank in the world ahead of Abrams and there is no bias review on that. The barrel of Abrams was designed by German company. Can M1 ford 30 feet of water? can it run smooth with no issues in sand, mud??? Can you handle M1 as rough as you can? the answer to that is no.

 

The Leopard-2 is a nice tank, the Australian Army used them before we got some used Abrams. One of the most noted capabilities of the Leopard-2 is its mobility as an MBT.

But then again I've watched footage of T-90s getting airborne leaping trenches. A Leopard won't do that.

[combatace]

The Leopard-2 is a nice tank, the Australian Army used them before we got some used Abrams. One of the most noted capabilities of the Leopard-2 is its mobility as an MBT.

But then again I've watched footage of T-90s getting airborne leaping trenches. A Leopard won't do that.

 

Ya leopard-2 can.