AHC: USSR ahead of USA techwise

Take a look at this, and tell me how it's possible for the Soviets to either get ahead, or if they do, to remain there. Hitler may have been worse with the sciences he refused to tolerate, but Stalin and his successors sure weren't open to some ideas.
This is the biggest problem. A totalitarian system will breed Lysenkoism, and eventually science will suffer for it.

The soviets were indeed ahead in the Space Race and it wasn't until the Mariners that the NASA began to beat them in their own ground (the USSR had been very successful sending probes to Venus, but the Mars ones were a string of failures). The US simply would advance much faster whenever they would set themselves to it.

I can only see a choice, that is probably so slim that is not realistic:
What if the space race had advanced much slower than IOTL, so much that the Soviet advancements were not seen as a strategical threat for the US. The US would be simply content to be able to place stuff in orbit to nullify the strategical advantage, and would not engage in a space race.
Also, another requirement might be a successful Perestroika that would transform the USSR into a non-totalitarian but not-completely-democratic state, with an economic system closer to the Swedish socialism. Very unlikely, i know, but if this happened, certainly the USSR would have been able to keep any scientific advantage on the space that it had managed to still have.
So: no space race + successful perestroika :eek:
 
However, the Soviets will likely always be behind in computers, which gives them an edge in most other fields that require a lot of mathematics.
 
However, the Soviets will likely always be behind in computers, which gives them an edge in most other fields that require a lot of mathematics.
Yeah... Soviet textbooks and handbooks of Mathematics are still among the best a student can get to follow during a college degree.
 
The space thing really is quite clear. Yes, the Soviet's were able to accomplish a lot of firsts, but the question is how and why. Ultimately their equipment was rugged and mostly reliable, but they had real problems with developing any new system and were far, far behind the Americans in terms of systems that were mechanically terribly more advanced than a big V2. Most prominently of course you've got no real prospect of cryogenic or large solid rockets, but even in terms of what they had scaling up was highly problematic - Proton wasn't realistically a reliable platform until after the moon landings and the N1 was never a particularly realistic design in the first place but was the only way to get ~100 ton capability out of the rockets they could build.

Fundamentally the ONLY thing the soviets were first in was the R7's payload capacity, which was less a byproduct of any advance over American effort's than a necessity given larger warheads that needed to be lofted in the ICBM role. Lighten the bombs to a level more like what the American's had and the Soviet program starts to look an awful lot like an also ran. They did an incredible amount with what they had, and it's frankly remarkable they came as close to a moon landing as they did, but realistically nothing about the Soviet program compares with what the Americans were doing post Mercury. I've actually heard Soyuz described by American's who trained on them early in the ISS program as somewhat less advanced than a Gemini, and while this is a bit of an exaggeration the point is valid.

IMO the greatest lesson from the Soviet program is that manned spaceflight is not necessarily as complicated as we sometimes assume - once you can get a reasonable payload to orbit with decent precision and make life support reliable you are most of the way to the moon, let alone an orbital station.
 
Which allowed them to develop the MiG-117 Nighthawk years before the US got the B2. No, wait...

Which still has nothing to do with undergraduate mathematics courses.

;)

The USSR always had a lot of catch-up to do in terms of producing large engines. It's evident in plane and tank design throughout the history of the competition.

Also, the Soviets were behind in computers, but not as dramatically as all that, at least until the microprocessor came around. After that it just became completely impossible to keep up independently; they lacked the raw materials, the machine tools and the incentive to produce large numbers.
 
Which allowed them to develop the MiG-117 Nighthawk years before the US got the B2. No, wait...
haha sadly you can't make stealth bombers on the raw power of theoretical mathematics alone :D
You need stuff like electronics and metallurgy (which they were behind because of the lag they had regarding Solid State Physics).
 
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