Inspired by the Did The Russians copy the B-29 Bomber? thread. Why did the Soviets peruse a policy of reverse engineering? Did they feel that their own scientists weren’t capable enough to design their own planes and computers? Or was it really cheaper and more efficient to reverse engineer what they needed?
Reverse engineering is a fast way to make something. It’s been used by everybody…currently, the Chinese and Koreans are big on reverse-engineering (stealing) as a way to get new products, without the expense of developing them. There are two problems with this approach:
(1) the people whose design you stole aren’t too happy. they may sue you for patent infringement.
(2) you have a product that may be obsolete. FIAT had no problem giving its obsolete Fiat 128 to Russia (where it was made as the LADA), because FIAT had a more modern model on the market. \Of course, an older design can be made better…personally, I’d love to have a 1967 CAMARO RS sedan, if it were made with all the modern updates (disc brakes, fuel injection, airbags, etc.)
Wehrner von Braun was pretty much a decade ahead of the world in liquid-fueled rocket research during World War II – most other designers were working for short-term gains, like better bombsights, jet engines, and so on. The Germans funded their rocket research, and consequently got themselves the V-2: the world’s first mass-produced liquid fuel rocket.
When the Allies took Berlin, the Soviets and the Americans split the take, with each side squirreling away finished V-2s, scientists, and so forth. We got von Braun, who we simply paid to continue his work. He realized that with a big budget and state of the art manufacturing facilities, he could “dream big”, and several of the early V-2 follow-ons had regular launch failures.
The Soviets got a handful of engineers, but many more V-2s, and so they set to work copying them and testing them. The Soviet R-1 (Rocket #1) was a nearly-perfect copy of the V-2 (more accurately, the A4), made with indigenous parts. During its construction, the engineers would come upon an insight that might permit improvement, but were told to make a note and continue to stay true to the original. When the R-1 was finished and successfully tested, work began on the G-1 and R-2, which each incorporated some of those improvements. The G-1 performed better, but the R-2 was chosen, and the G-1’s innovations were incorporated into the R-2. Right away, the Soviets had one of the best liquid-fueled rockets in the world.
Both sides used reverse engineering extensively to get our modern space programs. Sometimes, it’s all you’ve got!
Oh, they knew them to be intellectually capable, given the time and resources, BUT, from the political leaders’ central-planner ideological mentality, they’d see no reason to bother developing something from raw primary research without a guarantee that it would work in the end, when you have a sample of something that you already know it works. The main peculiarity in that system being that, as mentioned, they were often ordered to produce exact copies, and leave any improvements or refinements or defect corrections they came up with in the process for the following, home-grown generations of the technology.
The Soviets had an advantage there, since they took berlin, which was the world’s greatest industrial/scitific/engineering center up to 1944 or so, when wartime needs and security started wearing it down. After the Soviets stripped every machine out of every factory they could get their hands on (many of which wound up rusting in Russia, since the Sovs couldn’t actually use said machines), Berlin’s importance went toast up.
When the Communists won the civil war in the 1920s, they inherited a barely-industrialized nation. Outside the big cities with their minority of educated people, the vast majority of the populace were peasants, many illiterate, only a generation or two removed from serfdom. The Soviets were trying to industrialize with workers who in many cases had literally never learned to tell time by a clock. And this was in Russia proper; the vast eastern hinterlands were nominally controlled by Moscow but consisted of a handful of ethnic Russian outposts and a population of nomadic herders. Imagine a United States where a dozen or so big cities existed, but outside them the population consisted almost entirely of southern negro sharecroppers, upcountry hillbillies, cowboys and a sizable population of semi-settled Indians. The Soviet Union in 1925 was possibly more backward then the US was in 1875!
Given this situation, Soviet policy was to crash-industrialize by any means possible. This included vast amounts of what we’d now call industrial espionage or patent piracy. The USSR did produce top-notch scientists and engineers; but given that the USSR needed - well, everything, and it needed it yesterday, it was faster to produce knockoffs of proven designs. This leveled off by the late 1950s as the USSR reached rough parity in industrialization, but especially for high-tech stuff like aeronautics the Soviets continued to copy what they couldn’t develop independently. As late as the 1980s the Soviets produced the Buran spaceplane which was apparently heavily influenced by the Shuttle design.
Von Braun actually had infringed on most of the patents owned by Dr. Robert Goddard, who invented the liquid-fueled rocked in 1926. In addition, the guidance system used on the V-2 was another stolen Goddard patent. In his memors, Von Braun acknowledged this freely…the weird thing is, Goddard was largely ignored by the US Army…yet after the war, the US Govt. finally bought Goddard’s patents, and used them in further rocket development.
As for the Russians…they got some useful information from “their” ex-Nazi rocket scientists…but a lot of their rocket development was from indigenous sources.
One of the reasons that the Soviets ripped off the designs of popular American computers like the IBM 360, DEC PDP-11, and DEC VAX, was to gain access to vast quantities of Western software.
So is it true that the Western designers of Concorde got wind of Concordski, and knew there was a Soviet mole in their midst, so instead of trying to shut the leak down, they took a path of misinformation, including such things as specifying rubber compound for the tyres the consistency of liquorice? If it’s not, it’s still a good story.
Strictly speaking, I don’t think “reverse engineering” is merely copying someone’s design.
To reverse engineer you first get the item and put it through its paces. Then you write a specification for an item that does exactly what the thing in question does. Then you form a team of people who have never had any contact with the original designers or the company that produced the item. This team then comes up with a design that meets the specification.
That way you have something that does what you want without your being hauled into court for stealing proprietary stuff.
The Russians didn’t reverse engineer the B-29, they copied it. True, they had to develop some processes for the materials but that’s a different thing. That would be reverse engineering the manufacture of a material, not the whole plane. And I don’t believe they were able to make the tires so they bought the tires and wheels on the US war surplus market.
I’ve certainly not seen any evidence contradicting that story. Indeed, I’ve seen photographs of the skidmarks painted on the runway of the fictious tire make up.
Shortly after the fall of communism, some Western experts went over to the former USSR to help them get their country switched over to more Western styles of running and discovered that the Soviet built clones of the IBM 360s were exact duplicates. The Soviets hadn’t even bothered to correct the known glitches with the machines, even though they could have been easily fixed.