Stuff that stuck out for me from a technical perspective:
- make interfaces that connect different things so different
that you're not tempted to fit the one into the other
and so that communications about these are unambiguous
- KISS with a vengenance, better two simple things than one
complicated
- the supply lines are more important than the accuracy of
your weaponry
- better to make your high performance jets from a material
that you can procure during war
And a whole pile of minor elements. Weapons are not to be enjoyed unless for target practice, but the lessons in there are (judiciously) applicable to any kind of engineering.
The concept that really struck me was setting aside technical/engineering autism and calling 130mm mortar rounds '132mm mortar rounds'. It's the required amount of complexity and no more - it exchanges about one bit of additional information on the design side for many many bits of information on the implementation side. It is as close to free as communication gets.
It's the quintessential business decision - it manages laziness and hubris of staff for a vast improvement in user experience. The downside of such decisions is dealing with grumbling snowflakes. Like a Hero of the Valley, Stalin was known for ruthlessly expedient methods for handling dissent.
Well, Soviet/Russia is optimized to fight neighbouring countries. That implies more logistics problems than for e.g. USA.
What shocked me was the secrecy about weapon systems, to train people without letting them even see the equipment they would use if the fertilizer hit the fan.
From a perspective from around 40 years ago, there were two cases:
An open society, with quite a lot of research published. And a closed society, which could import the information from the open society (including a lot about weapon engineering) but kept their cards hidden.
before hindsight, it wasn't obvious which solution would work in the end.
Comments
Stuff that stuck out for me from a technical perspective:
And a whole pile of minor elements. Weapons are not to be enjoyed unless for target practice, but the lessons in there are (judiciously) applicable to any kind of engineering.The concept that really struck me was setting aside technical/engineering autism and calling 130mm mortar rounds '132mm mortar rounds'. It's the required amount of complexity and no more - it exchanges about one bit of additional information on the design side for many many bits of information on the implementation side. It is as close to free as communication gets.
It's the quintessential business decision - it manages laziness and hubris of staff for a vast improvement in user experience. The downside of such decisions is dealing with grumbling snowflakes. Like a Hero of the Valley, Stalin was known for ruthlessly expedient methods for handling dissent.
Well, Soviet/Russia is optimized to fight neighbouring countries. That implies more logistics problems than for e.g. USA.
What shocked me was the secrecy about weapon systems, to train people without letting them even see the equipment they would use if the fertilizer hit the fan.
From a perspective from around 40 years ago, there were two cases:
An open society, with quite a lot of research published. And a closed society, which could import the information from the open society (including a lot about weapon engineering) but kept their cards hidden.
before hindsight, it wasn't obvious which solution would work in the end.