Because of the Cold War, Russia was largely isolated from the West…from 1939 to about 1990. Consequently, the Russians had to develop their own semiconductor industry, their own TV technology, their own computers (they “borrowed” a lot from IBM machines).
My question is, did they ever wind up with a better way of doing some things?
I read that the Russians stuck with vacuum tube technology (while the West went solid state)-and the Russians actually developed some high-power radar systems that were better than the Western equivilents.
In East Germany, the optrical experts at the Zeiss works came up with their own photolithograpy systems, that turned out to be as good as anything in the West.Did the Russians manage any big breathrough technologies, as a result of their isolation?
Ekranoplanes.
Also, the first spacecraft and generally held the lead in the space race for a while too.
That’s not quite in isolation, though. As World War II was winding down, both sides were trying to score as much German technology and brainpower as they could get.
It still took them over a decade after WWII to get Sputnik into orbit, though. And Gagarin wasn’t in orbit until 1961.
But the difference is that the Russians (most notably Tsiolkovsky, Glushko, and Korolyov) had already been pretty innovative at developing rocket theory independent of German and Western development prior to WWII. (So did Goddard, but owing to his own imposed isolation and unwillingness to publish, and general American disinterest in rocketry for warfare and space development, his contributions were largely ignored until developed independently by von Braun’s group and other American aerospace researchers in the late 'Forties and 'Fifties.) While the Americans and British grabbed the cream of the crop of scientists/engineers and equipment from the Aggregate programs in Peenemünde and Kummersdorf, the Soviets got the second tier of experienced designers and mostly non-functional A4s, and they basically used this as a library resource to extract information to feed back into their own independent research. Until the 'Sixties, the Soviets were clearly ahead in both ballistic missile and space launch vehicle capabilities, and if you divorce their production and quality control problems they were arguably as good or better at developing novel and functional rocket technology through the 'Seventies. The only place they really fell short were real time avionics controls owing to their lagging semiconductor manufacturing industries; they just couldn’t get the same level of control or accuracy as American designers using the best of Western computer technology. Most of the other differences–the heavier and more robust construction, the more simplistic maintenance designs, et cetera–were philosophical differences in design, not pure limitations of capability As an example of this, the Atlas III used and Atlas V Common Booster Core uses the RD-180, developed from and produced by NPO Energomash, in preference to the previous Rocketdyne MA-5, as the former provides more thrust, has higher propulsive efficiency, and is more reliable than the MA-5.
Stranger