harywilke 9 months ago

Read a very interesting book on the space race from the soviet side. One of the things that stood out was the lack of solid state transistor technology meant that they were using tube transistors in their space craft. This was one of the reasons they had problems doing spacewalks. They couldn't expose the interior of their capsules to space or the electronics would go pop. The Wrong Stuff How the Soviet Space Program Crashed and Burned by John strausbaugh https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/john-strausbaugh/th...

  • izacus 9 months ago

    The title itself should tell you that the book is there to sensationalize and grind an axe, not to actually provide any historical accuracy.

    And yep, the author didn't even bother to use primary sources: https://www.thespacereview.com/article/4851/1

    It's like recommending a book about Apollo program written by Russians without reading any US documentation.

    If there has to be a western author, James Harford's Korolev biography is a better put together look into Soviet space program and actually has some proper academic reviews.

    • kens 9 months ago

      I read "Beyond: The Astonishing Story of the First Human to Leave Our Planet and Journey into Space" and found it very interesting. It is a detailed history of the early Soviet space program and Yuri Gagarin's flight.

  • MrBuddyCasino 9 months ago

    Why would a vacuum tube „pop“ when exposed to vacuum?

    • analog31 9 months ago

      Possibly nowhere for the heat to go. Some tubes need a certain amount of ventilation depending on the application. It wouldn't pop, but might fail.

    • numpad0 9 months ago

      Some of Soviet spacecrafts were known to have been built around ~1atm pressure vessels as a brute force means to reduce unknown unknowns. I suspect it could be reverse reasoning from there.

    • dmix 9 months ago

      probably because the vacuum of space is way more extreme than inside the tube which would cause pressure on the seals

      • teraflop 9 months ago

        Vacuum tubes typically have an internal pressure of less than 0.001 atm, sometimes much less.

        Any seal that can withstand a pressure difference of 0.001 atm to 1 atm from the outside can almost certainly withstand a difference of 0.001 atm to 0 atm from the inside.

  • bgnn 9 months ago

    that's bullshit. vacuum tubes are used in spacecraft by NASA too. it's likely they are still used. they don't pop in vacuum. plus they're more radiation resistant thwn transistors.

LetsGetTechnicl 9 months ago

Whether or not its technically inferior to American space technology at the time, you have to admire the ingenuity.

richrichie 9 months ago

Mechanical computers are still used onboard Russian warships. These are meant to function under EMP attacks.

thrownawaysz 9 months ago

Dumb question: How do you jam a device like this? Is it even possible? Example: you want them to land at an incorrect location or doing more orbits than planned

  • Ugohcet 9 months ago

    You don't. This is basically a clock display with extra knobs and dials. It doesn't have any sensors or inputs except 1sec pulse.

rbanffy 9 months ago

Now we need one on the Apollo 8 ball.

  • kens 9 months ago

    As soon as someone loans us an FDAI...

hintymad 9 months ago

Ha, the similar technology that Eridians used to launch Rocky's blip-A.