Exciting times! So happy this is posting regularly again. The Shuttle-C version of Early Lunar Access is awesome, almost identical to some wacky plans I dreamed up once for a more successful Bush SEI.
A Sound of Thunder: The Rise of the Soviet Superbooster
- Thread starter nixonshead
- Start date
Yup
lol, couldn't resist
Leningrad apparently had an issue similar to Chernobyl where the power spiked when putting rods in, this was covered up, imagine if an RBMK did a chernobyl in Leningrad or Moscow
its like playing russian roulette with 5/6 chambers loaded
It's how they built their government where nobody takes responsibility, it was like that from Stalin to Gorbachev
"its not MY problem" is a big thing
Chernobyl caused them to spend LOTS for response and repairs and cleanup, even with their military spending Chernobyl was a huge portion, not to mention the openness policy exposed the structural issues in society that the soviets had hidden
the Soviet Union would have collapsed, Chernobyl basically speed it up
Its his TL, i hope he doesn't fix the TILE issue's as it would ground the fleet, i wonder what his SRB fix is, anything drastic means grounding and LRBs will be nearly 8 years away
However, this may prevent the ISS from running out of electricity due to the failure to launch the NEP OTL.
I don't think we can take that at face value, considering he didn't want the USSR to fall and he was responsible for perestroika but not for Chernobyl.
The more I have read about the collapse of the Soviet Union the less true that seems to me. The succession of events including the breakdown of the economy and top down dismantling of the political system was almost entirely driven by Gorbachev, in a tl where he never becomes leader I think the USSR has a >80% chance of survival though the Warsaw Pact is much less sustainable.
Yes the Soviet Union had stagnated economically under Brezhnev and yes a technological gap had opened up but neither problem was impossible* to solve within the system
*You're never going to get GDP per capita catching up with the West while maintaining the system but a surviving USSR could definitely have the per capita GDP similar to modern Russia and if the modern Russian state, with a much higher burden of corruption and a less comprehensive security apparatus can maintain itself, so could a surviving USSR.
Ditto the technological gap, yes the Soviet's were a decade plus behind in electronics but Star Wars isn't going to work so MAD will still deter any conflict. The Soviet advantage in conventional military capabilities in Europe will be reduced by Reagan's build up but how much benefit did the Soviets reap from their advantage in the 70's? Not much, the same in reverse will apply in the alt 90's.
There is a bit of a problem here with the possible 1990s. The collapse of the Warsaw Pact and RPWG is rather certain - there is too much unwillingness among Poles, Germans and Hungarians to remain in the current relations with the USSR/Russia. A new form of agreement will have to be created. Additionally, within the USSR itself, there are strong nationalist movements in the Baltic states and in the western parts of Belarus and Ukraine.
A smaller USSR will be able to survive, but the longer the agony, the greater the chance that its collapse may lose its controlled nature.
The Poles certainly but the situation with the other members is still up in the air at this point in time. They were also dependent on Soviet material support and had decades of social cooperation, it is possible a smaller Warsaw Pact could survive but it would be a whole different thing after the 90s.
Same as with the nationalist movements, the Baltics were the worst while Ukraine and Belarus even in OTL were willing to remain part of the Soviet Union though, with more influence.
(Though while a technological gap existed I am unsure how big it was, the Soviet where producing and selling western copies of microchips, microprocessors and other electronics at cheaper prices, and theh were slowly making improvements upon the copies.)
We're moving a little off topic here, but...
I agree that Gorbachev does not get the last word on the role Chernobyl (or anything else) played in the collapse of the Soviet Union, and not just because he is an interested party. But the current historiography generally does assign a significant role of the disaster in the collapse, and I don't think that's an implausible analysis at all. It cost a pretty thick slice of Soviet GDP to contain and clean up, at a moment when it could scarce afford it; and it was a real body blow to the credibility of the regime, too, at a moment when it could scarce afford *that*, either.
I don't disagree that the Soviet Union's collapse in 1989-91 was not predetermined! It *could* have lasted longer. There is a rich tradition of declining empires finding a way to stagger on largely intact for a surprising length of time (see: Ottoman Empire; Qing Empire; etc. ) . . .
. . . but the fundamental structural and cultural flaws in the USSR were very real and were going to be crippling within that generation, no matter who was in charge. With or without Chernobyl. (Though an accident like Chernobyl seems to have been inevitable at some point.) I do not agree that the system was capable of fundamental reform.
I suppose the upside of such timelines is that you can string along a robust Soviet space program for a little longer, and that creates some interesting possibilities!
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Chernobyl (epic fuckup) plus perestroika (letting everyone know about the epic fuckup) plus a chaotic system that couldn't channel popular anger into meaningful reform was deeply damaging. But with no perestroika it would have been survivable, it's not like the Soviet's hadn't covered up disasters before and if Gorbachev had managed to actually reform the political system rather than breaking it it could have been survivable.
I disagree that it was incapable of reform, while China is a poor comparison as it actually was much stronger internally for every structural problem the USSR faced in 1980 Cuba had two but one regime survived, the other fell. Competent (if not necessarily moral) leadership from the top can get you out of a lot of trouble.
The Eastern Block was making copies of some earlier designs, but they were firmly behind, and the gap was widening in the 1980s. As long as they were starting from western designs for things like memory chips and processors, they were stuck behind the west, and without investments in development that dwarfed those in the west (which they could not afford even if they wanted to), they were always running to catch up. Furthermore even by 1989 the Soviet Union and client states didn't have the same computer adoption in homes that was seen in the US. While it was still only bout 10% in the mid 1980s in the US, that was enough to help kick-start wide adoption of people who could program for hardware that was being developed, which gets a positive feedback loop started, where more software means more and better hardware, which means more and better software, and so on. As I understand it, the Soviet Union was never quite able to get that loop going.
The problem arises because they started copying Western solutions instead of developing their own. This proved to be the case with abusrdu, where before a given solution was copied, a newer generation had already appeared in the West. The cycle repeats itself. Without changes in the economic management system under Stalin, the USSR will face a complete political and economic collapse, if not in the 1990s, then at the beginning of the 21st century, where it will not be able to make up for the losses at all.
Earlier designs were the technology of 2 to 3 years ago, but as the new ones started to appear on the market at a lower frequency than in the 60s to 80s the Soviets were gaining more ground, if slowly, also, don't dismiss the improved earlier designs, stuff made in the 70s and 80s was extremely used throughout the world in the 2000s and 2010s for a variety of applications that did not require high performance microprocessors. (There's a point where any new microprocessor technology is just an increase of factory precision and nothing new from previous designs.)
True, but that's mostly down to their mentality. The reason why programming languages and personal computers lagged so much could be blamed on how the Academia and Industry saw them, as tools meant for mathematicians (BESM-4/6) to perform complex computations and for industrial automation. In addition to the whole mess of getting it organized that only happened in the 80s.
My views on the Soviet Union have changed quite a bit since I've spoken on this topic.
Yes, the collapse of the Soviet Union is not inevitable. I've read some illuminating (Marxist) analyses on the Soviet economy and a feature of these analyses is the vastly higher frequency of defective commodities. I don't want to go indepth here - if you're interested, I can send you a link in private conversation.
To summarize, the Soviet economy in these analyses was fundamentally a form of state capitalism, but a peculiar form in which the law of value was deformed. Cutting short quite a many things off the analysis and skipping to the conclusion, the restriction of money and elimination of markets in what nominally would be a capitalist economy, as well as the subordination of the accumulation process to productive capital and not capital/money proper, led to the Soviet economy accumulating defective commodities, rather than commodities proper. This did not make the USSR's economy socialist but rather it led to a degenerate version of capitalism, if you will.
China became far more successful than the USSR because of the Opening-up and reform, which liberalized and marketized much of the country. It still has many of the same trappings as the Soviet economy; there is a truth to the perception that Chinese goods tend to be more defective and unreliable, even if that perception is mostly rooted in protectionism, nationalism and xenophobia. Better signs yet are the vast amounts of empty apartment buildings, neighborhoods and towns constructed in rural China. It's definitely an uneven thing.
The USSR on the other hand, and their attempts at reform, showed that the bureaucratic elite was ultimately too much of a bunch of believers in socialism and at the same time too kleptocratic and capitalistic to get work done one way or another.
It's my opinion that reforming the USSR economy would not have been possible without PoDs which predate A Sound of Thunder and are far bigger in scope. Certainly by the last few decades reform would have led to some degree of violent civil war. The Opening-up was only technically a less violent process than it would have been because the conservatives had discredited themselves in the Cultural Revolution. As IOTL, the USSR ultimately collapsed in favor for the liberal capitalist reformers.
As for the electronics industry, it is probably possible to narrow the gap while under the old Soviet mode of production, but there'll be always a gap. By the late 60s things were too late; the USSR never really invested enough capital to build up a proper electronics industry at home. Because of this the USSR became dependent on the West, and dependency is a relationship which has a positive feedback loop too.
If the Soviets invested their resources, they could achieve parity with Western economies in electronics and the space program - these limited, certain areas, but unlike us, very little of the bureaucratic elite care about sci-fi hijinks and big thunderin' rockets, even if they are nice to have around; that parity would be at the cost of other industries.
Back to the political: not reforming the Soviet economy is not fatal to the USSR's existence. Dictatorships are regularly held together on far more little; the country would have likely turned into a flavor of North Korea, party size edition by the 21st century. But the chances that the country is going to collapse are going to be more frequent and more probable as time passes; collapse under such an economy is just an inevitability. It wasn't 100% one in 1991, though!
For A Sound of Thunder? Fully capitalist USSR is the only way given the premises of the TL, either that, or a less worse Russia.
Yes, the collapse of the Soviet Union is not inevitable. I've read some illuminating (Marxist) analyses on the Soviet economy and a feature of these analyses is the vastly higher frequency of defective commodities. I don't want to go indepth here - if you're interested, I can send you a link in private conversation.
To summarize, the Soviet economy in these analyses was fundamentally a form of state capitalism, but a peculiar form in which the law of value was deformed. Cutting short quite a many things off the analysis and skipping to the conclusion, the restriction of money and elimination of markets in what nominally would be a capitalist economy, as well as the subordination of the accumulation process to productive capital and not capital/money proper, led to the Soviet economy accumulating defective commodities, rather than commodities proper. This did not make the USSR's economy socialist but rather it led to a degenerate version of capitalism, if you will.
China became far more successful than the USSR because of the Opening-up and reform, which liberalized and marketized much of the country. It still has many of the same trappings as the Soviet economy; there is a truth to the perception that Chinese goods tend to be more defective and unreliable, even if that perception is mostly rooted in protectionism, nationalism and xenophobia. Better signs yet are the vast amounts of empty apartment buildings, neighborhoods and towns constructed in rural China. It's definitely an uneven thing.
The USSR on the other hand, and their attempts at reform, showed that the bureaucratic elite was ultimately too much of a bunch of believers in socialism and at the same time too kleptocratic and capitalistic to get work done one way or another.
It's my opinion that reforming the USSR economy would not have been possible without PoDs which predate A Sound of Thunder and are far bigger in scope. Certainly by the last few decades reform would have led to some degree of violent civil war. The Opening-up was only technically a less violent process than it would have been because the conservatives had discredited themselves in the Cultural Revolution. As IOTL, the USSR ultimately collapsed in favor for the liberal capitalist reformers.
As for the electronics industry, it is probably possible to narrow the gap while under the old Soviet mode of production, but there'll be always a gap. By the late 60s things were too late; the USSR never really invested enough capital to build up a proper electronics industry at home. Because of this the USSR became dependent on the West, and dependency is a relationship which has a positive feedback loop too.
If the Soviets invested their resources, they could achieve parity with Western economies in electronics and the space program - these limited, certain areas, but unlike us, very little of the bureaucratic elite care about sci-fi hijinks and big thunderin' rockets, even if they are nice to have around; that parity would be at the cost of other industries.
Back to the political: not reforming the Soviet economy is not fatal to the USSR's existence. Dictatorships are regularly held together on far more little; the country would have likely turned into a flavor of North Korea, party size edition by the 21st century. But the chances that the country is going to collapse are going to be more frequent and more probable as time passes; collapse under such an economy is just an inevitability. It wasn't 100% one in 1991, though!
For A Sound of Thunder? Fully capitalist USSR is the only way given the premises of the TL, either that, or a less worse Russia.
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Stalin could brute force (at horrifying human cost) a crash program of basic heavy industry, and his successors could keep it going, more or less.
But the information revolution that was emerging in the West by the 1980's required a very different development matrix that the Soviet system simply was not able to adopt in any form. They could steal IP and, with real effort, reverse engineer it; but they couldn't do it quickly enough, or at sufficient scale. The longer the thing staggered on....the greater the gap would have become. I think TimothyC's assessment is on target here, I'm afraid.
This is why Clint Eastwood's Firefox (1983) is so laughably fantastic, even if this was not fully understood by the publics in the West at the time (though it is a ripping good fun Cold War thriller, if you can shut off that part of your brain). The idea that the same state that had produced a MiG -25 so primitive in its avionics and metallurgy that CIA analysts were stunned when they got hold of Viktor Belenko's copy in 1976 could somehow, within less than a decade, produce a Mach 5 fifth generation fighter with flawless neural interface is stark enough to underline just how far behind the Soviet high technology industries had fallen behind even by the early 1980's.
Yeah, the Soviet empire simply had some serious disadvantages that the PRC did not suffer from:
1) The cultural problem: For all the damage done by the Cultural Revolution, the surviving sinews of Confucian culture were still a healthier, less pathological basis on which to rebuild a more entrepreneurial economy than what the Soviet Union had by the 1970's.
2) The nationalities problem: Great Russians only accounted for barely 50% of the Soviet population; and you have to really include the Warsaw Pact nations in the imperial demographic tally, which the Soviets had to prop up, or risk losing critical amounts of face; that drops the Russian share of the whole to less than a third. Whereas Han Chinese accounted for over 90% of the PRC population in that entire period; moreover, they had no array of large and restless client states to prop up.
3) The USSR's greater extent and client states in Europe and the Third World required maintenance of a considerably larger and more costly defense establishment which the PRC did not require.
On top of that, the PRC had a much more concentrated area of critical real estate in which they needed to develop or maintain infrastructure than the sprawling USSR did; and by the 80's, of course, they had access to a good deal more foreign investment capital than the USSR could ever hope to access.
With a POD in the 60's, the USSR could have staggered on into the early 21st century; but only if it had a leadership still willing to shoot people (i.e., not someone like Gorbachev). But it would have been a long slide of ever more feeble economic growth (contraction, honestly), growing corruption, and ever greater technological gaps versus the Western power centers, to say nothing of ever more restive subject peoples. They could still do some remarkable things in space in spite of all that; though they'd have spend a good deal more of their GDP than the US, ESA or Japan had to in order to sustain it...
Nice to see the N1 finally going beyond its IRL planned flights.
What's the status of the Venusian exploration? Did it get less focus.
So a east german on Zarya, we're in the interkosmos era, a good 5 years later than IRL sadly, Is there any hope of seeing a Frenchman or Indian on the station, just as with Salyut 7 IRL? I imagine that brezhnev never proposed to Giscard to send a frenchman to space, this probably means somewhat less Franco-soviet cooperations in space in general, as well as less French interest in crewed spaceflight until the mid 80s.
What are the status of the IRL planned "Weather satellite launches" and "Radio interferometry missions" that were to be launched on N1 in the mid 70s? Sorry if it's been mentionned before. I imagine the Weather Satellite are larger than the Meteor or early Elektro projects.
Are foreign experiments flying on Zarya. Could there be considerations of flying Space observatories on it? Maybe decisions to put the several planned Astrons observatories onboard future stations given their large size?
I'll be asking again how's Zenit in this timeline, NK-33 powered? Smaller without the necessity of Energia Commonality? The soviets would also be looking into Proton replacement, and 20-30 tons launchers. IRL that gave the Energia-M, 11k37, bunch of projects of Proton enhancement w/ hydrogen upper stage.
Could the good old N-II make a come back? NK-35 would open opportunities for making N-I derived launchers. And I'm wondering, with the six center engines removed, could that basic aerospike N1 proposal happen?
What's the status of the Venusian exploration? Did it get less focus.
So a east german on Zarya, we're in the interkosmos era, a good 5 years later than IRL sadly, Is there any hope of seeing a Frenchman or Indian on the station, just as with Salyut 7 IRL? I imagine that brezhnev never proposed to Giscard to send a frenchman to space, this probably means somewhat less Franco-soviet cooperations in space in general, as well as less French interest in crewed spaceflight until the mid 80s.
What are the status of the IRL planned "Weather satellite launches" and "Radio interferometry missions" that were to be launched on N1 in the mid 70s? Sorry if it's been mentionned before. I imagine the Weather Satellite are larger than the Meteor or early Elektro projects.
Are foreign experiments flying on Zarya. Could there be considerations of flying Space observatories on it? Maybe decisions to put the several planned Astrons observatories onboard future stations given their large size?
I'll be asking again how's Zenit in this timeline, NK-33 powered? Smaller without the necessity of Energia Commonality? The soviets would also be looking into Proton replacement, and 20-30 tons launchers. IRL that gave the Energia-M, 11k37, bunch of projects of Proton enhancement w/ hydrogen upper stage.
Could the good old N-II make a come back? NK-35 would open opportunities for making N-I derived launchers. And I'm wondering, with the six center engines removed, could that basic aerospike N1 proposal happen?
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I personally am not sure about this. Peasants regularly traveled to cities to sell produce on their own in the 70s and an important part of Soviet housing in the 80s were cooperatives and developers who built housing for sale on the market. Soviets had plenty of entrepreneurial spirit, it just that reform wasn't successful
when it comes to the cold war i believe in this
- Oppenheimer wanted the Atomics to remain king, and Teller's Super bomb was a threat to this so he tried to end it, Oppy never said Nukes were bad (unlike the movie), and Teller is one of the greatest men in human history for his creation ending big wars as we know it
- The Soviets would have collapsed at some point unless huge changes were made, i.e. more privatization with less openness (Like China) or going full Stalin and 5-year plan that shit. Chernobyl may or may not have caused the collapse, but it along with the Openness policy (along with Afghanistan) caused the soviet people to doubt their leaders and thus caused the collapse (not to mention rampant corruption). Plus it drained resources from the economy which were NEEDED elsewhere. Plus Reagan's military and space buildup made the Soviets spend insane money to keep up
- The Moon program and space race were due to Politics AND NOT EXPLORATION
- The Americans had better leaders CONSISTANTLY, while the Soviets had worse over time until Gorbachov
You could argue that Gorbachev was worse than his predecessors in his implementation of his reforms. With Brezhnev and Andropov maintaining the status quo and fighting corruption respectively, still while maintaining a somewhat stability in the Soviet Union while Gorbachev threw that out of the window without long-term considerations with an effectively antagonistic US.
(Also, are we sure it will be Gorbachev who succeeds Andropov? There were more reformists/moderates besides him.)
H bomb would have been made at some point, either by soviets or brits first, Teller Ulam secret was literally independently discovered 4+ times, no analysis of fallout of american tests would have delayed the process quite a bit, but it would have happened.
Current war convinced me that the isolationist, hardliner option was somewhat viable, and that the USSR could have *survived* another great purge or even a civil war, wouldn't be the best option for SPACE, tho, or a lot of other things.
Politics and Military.
Khrushchev was better than JFK by early 60s.
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