No B-29s land in the USSR

A case in point being nonsense like this. We have solid examples of industrial engineers in the USSR continuing work on projects that were unapproved or even against orders without being punished, yet nonsense like this still gets peddled.
So let's talk about Korolev. Was his time in the Gulag to realign his jaw?
Or Glushko.
Then again Tupolev.
And Bartini, Polikarpov, Myasishchev and Petlyakov.
They all needed that time at Beria's vacation camp, yes?
Still better than Kalinin, who was killed, along with Kurchevsky.

Don't whitewash the Purges.
It happened.
People were tortured and killed
 
You sure? That doesn't look like any Douglas aircraft I can find in terms of the tail. I think that's a post-war design from another company that would have come after WW2 and the Soviets wouldn't have known about when designing the Tu-64.
DC-4E, first flown in 1938.

Japanese based their G5N off of it.
 
So let's talk about Korolev. Was his time in the Gulag to realign his jaw?
Or Glushko.
Then again Tupolev.
And Bartini, Polikarpov, Myasishchev and Petlyakov.
They all needed that time at Beria's vacation camp, yes?
Still better than Kalinin, who was killed, along with Kurchevsky.

Sure. Let’s talk about them. Were any of them sent to the Gulag/shot because they worked on unapproved projects? Or because they were accused for political reasons of various ridiculous crimes? You’ll find that in each case, it was the latter reason.

Don't whitewash the Purges.
It happened.
People were tortured and killed

Don’t strawman your opponent.
Trying to turn the observation that getting purged had more to do with politics then ones capacity at science and engineering into a accusation of “whitewashing the purges” is blatantly dishonest.
 
It took forever to get it right and then they hardly built any of them. Vs the US B-52 being built in the hundreds and decades earlier.
The USSR was not that great at building aircraft (remember the concord-ski?) even the MiG 15 was as much the result of German research and English derived engines as it was anything to do with the Soviets.
Err, sorry, but what? The Tu-95 entered service at around the same time as the BUFF.
And before you say but but, propellers, remember, it was 1) Turboprops and until good turbofans came into being in the 60’s, props were a better solution for long-range. The BUFF had 8 (!) Turbofans and they seriously considered using 4 turboprops.
 
The Pe-8, which was the only heavy bomber in the USSR during the war was roughly comparable to the B-17, although it had significant reliability problems compared to the B-17 and was produced in tiny numbers in comparison due to the limited ability of the USSR to produce engines in particular even before Barbarossa kicked off. Because of the limits of Soviet industry with the devastation caused by Barbarossa, displacing factories, and the Soviet strategic planning basically very little work was done on a heavy bomber design during the war. Such design work or thinking on this issue was "napkinwaffe". Going from a model and sketches to a detailed design let alone testing and production is going to be a long and laborious project. It is important to remember that from 1945 to 1950 the USSR had to spend enormous resources on rebuilding a devastated country, and also the integration of the occupied nations of Eastern Europe in to the Soviet sphere. By copying the B-29 the resources needed to get an interim effective heavy bomber were markedly reduced as well as having these in place when the USSR joined the atomic club.

The fact that in the early 1950s the USSR was able to get the Tu-16 in to squadron service within four years or so, does not scale backwards 5-7 years to the USSR just emerging from WWII. By the early 1950s the USSR had made substantial recovery from the devastation of WWII, especially in areas like military design and production facilities which were prioritized in the recovery phase. Neither the Tu-16 nor the B-47 which preceded it in service by 2-3 years was a "heavy" bomber, both were "mediums" in the jet age. Additionally while both had comparable ranges, the USAF was well ahead in mid-air refueling assets (and always would be) so that even without advanced bases in the UK or other overseas bases the B-47 could strike in the USSR, whereas the Tu-16 at best might be able to strike limited targets in the USA but only on one-way missions.

It is also worth remembering that Soviet jet engine design got a huge boost not so much from captured Nazi engines but rather from the RR Nene sold to the immediately following WWII. Another example of a tech jump start.

Again, it is not so much that the USSR could not have built a B-29 equivalent, or decent jet engines absent these sorts of transfers, just that getting them accelerated the process substantially. Just like the atomic bomb, the spy information did not transform a hopeless program (like the Nazis had) in to a viable one, rather it eliminated a lot of the false leads and duplications making the jump-started program more efficient. During WWII and for some time afterwards, the USSR was severely resource limited in terms of ability to produce high quality engineered goods of any sort in quantity. Being able to streamline and accelerate with decent products to copy was a huge boost. This sort of thing was not limited to the USSR - the captured V2s even without the "Paperclip" folks were helpful in giving US rocketry a boost.
 

Deleted member 1487

DC-4E, first flown in 1938.

Japanese based their G5N off of it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_DC-4E
The Douglas DC-4E was an American experimental airliner that was developed before World War II. The DC-4E never entered production due to being superseded by an entirely new design, the Douglas DC-4/C-54, which proved very successful. Many DC-4E design features found their way into the Japanese Nakajima G5N bomber.[3]

Maybe the Soviets knew of it, but I kind of doubt the influence of the design. Probably in the end it was simply a function of there only being so many different styles of design available, so it was likely that designers would independently hit on similar ideas. After all the tail design was used by the Lancaster and earlier German bombers as well.
 
I think the "eliminated dead ends" excuse for spying is overblown. We know they **did** examine supposed dead ends in case the Anglo-Americans had given up too easily and in a couple of cases (like gas centifuges) showed that they weren't dead end at all.
 
Sure. Let’s talk about them. Were any of them sent to the Gulag/shot because they worked on unapproved projects? Or because they were accused for political reasons of various ridiculous crimes? You’ll find that in each case, it was the latter reason.
Performance was poor on the Stal-7, that got Bartini sent off.

Kurchevsky got arrested for working on a helicopter. During the Purges, he was charged with designing poor weapons, the recoilless rifles, and was shot.
 
Going from a model and sketches to a detailed design let alone testing and production is going to be a long and laborious project.

About as long and laborious as the detailed examination, disassembly, replication, and reproduction of the B-29 took. The changes in material, hydraulics, and wiring likewise required the Tu-4 undergo as extensive testing as a brand new aircraft would go through before being approved for serial production.

It is important to remember that from 1945 to 1950 the USSR had to spend enormous resources on rebuilding a devastated country, and also the integration of the occupied nations of Eastern Europe in to the Soviet sphere. By copying the B-29 the resources needed to get an interim effective heavy bomber were markedly reduced as well as having these in place when the USSR joined the atomic club.

The reverse-engineering of the B-29 was very much a massive investment of resources quite on the scale of the development of a wholly new aircraft. Had the Soviets not the resources to build, then they could not have reproduced the Tu-4. Nearly a thousand industrial facilities and research institutes were involved in the project. Disassembly alone was a immense challenge, since every step of the way each part had to carefully and non-destructively be extracted then determined whether it was a part unto itself or a subassembly of another part, and all in a way that left it completely unaltered for measurement. The fact that the bomber chosen for disassembly was not factory fresh further complicated matters, as the Soviets had to then estimate distortions on things like wing spars and fuselage joints and then do extensive testing to see how their calculations measured up.

The fact that in the early 1950s the USSR was able to get the Tu-16 in to squadron service within four years or so, does not scale backwards 5-7 years to the USSR just emerging from WWII.

By the early 1950s the USSR had made substantial recovery from the devastation of WWII, especially in areas like military design and production facilities which were prioritized in the recovery phase.

Again, this is unsupported nonsense. Soviet military economy has already recovered to pre-war levels by 1945, it was the civilian economy that needed an extensive recovery and in the industrial sector that was largely completed by 1948 (although the agricultural and service sectors would lag into the early-50s).

It is also worth remembering that Soviet jet engine design got a huge boost not so much from captured Nazi engines but rather from the RR Nene sold to the immediately following WWII. Another example of a tech jump start.

I can find nothing in common between the Tu-16’s AM-3 and the Nene.

Again, it is not so much that the USSR could not have built a B-29 equivalent, or decent jet engines absent these sorts of transfers, just that getting them accelerated the process substantially. Just like the atomic bomb, the spy information did not transform a hopeless program (like the Nazis had) in to a viable one, rather it eliminated a lot of the false leads and duplications making the jump-started program more efficient.

I’ve already pointed out how fast the atomic bomb spying accelerated the Soviet nuclear program. Assuming a similar accelerative timeframe, that still puts the Soviets ATL domestic bombers first flight in 1947/48 and operational service in 1949/50. This is ignoring that the Tu-4 program began slightly later (about 5-8 months, with progress having gotten as far as the wooden mock-up stage at about the 5 month mark*) after the original ANT-64 project it terminated.

*Interesting comparison here: the Tu-4 didn't reach wooden mock-up stage until December 1946, 18 months after the project began.

Performance was poor on the Stal-7, that got Bartini sent off.

Kurchevsky got arrested for working on a helicopter. During the Purges, he was charged with designing poor weapons, the recoilless rifles, and was shot.

Bartini was arrested on dubious charges of spying for Italy, with some bogus charges of sabotage (among others) tacked on as a after-thought. He never saw a work camp though: he was immediately put into a Sharashka, basically a research camp, where he worked on the Yer and Tu-2 bombers. Still nothing about being punished for working on unapproved projects.

In Kurchevsky's case... well there's two different cases there. The 1924 arrest was done not because he worked on a helicopter but because he embezzled state funds to do so. Regardless of your thoughts of engineers working on unapproved projects, I'm pretty sure you would agree that stealing money from the government to do so is a legitimate crime. His 1937 arrest and execution likewise came from the fact that his approved projects had proven to be irreparably defective, not that he was working on unapproved projects, even if that's still a shitty reason to execute a man. The fact he was a close associate of Tukhachevsky, which was a very politically problematic place to be in late-1937, probably didn't help.
 
There is a resemblance:
Me264
264-2.gif

View attachment 478428

Tupolev
2IqfQZF.jpg



Though to be fair there are differences, the Soviet design as a different nose and longer one, while having a shorter, thicker aft section, while the Messerschmitt is longer and thinner at the back. If it was from 1943 then I doubt they knew about the ME264.


You sure? That doesn't look like any Douglas aircraft I can find in terms of the tail. I think that's a post-war design from another company that would have come after WW2 and the Soviets wouldn't have known about when designing the Tu-64.
DC-4E (The original DC-4 before a better version became the C-54/DC-4 that we all know) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_DC-4E
 

DougM

Donor
Exactly what long range, large bombload high technology (for its day) bomber has the USSR EVER BEEN able to build that would lead you to believe that the USSR in 1946 was in a position to design and build its own bomber that would equal the B29?
Yes they built the Bear but let’s be honest they did that by cutting more then a few corners. And sorry but a turboprop is NOT the same as a jet bomber for multiple reasons, not saying the Bear is a Bad bomber but it is not a B52. Pretty much every other bomber was limited in various noticeably ways until the last one which came so late that it was not produced in any significant numbers.

Note I am not saying the USSR was not going to build a bomber the equal to (or better then) the B-29. I am just saying it would have taken longer.
 

thorr97

Banned
It'd be a better world indeed if the USSR did NOT get its hands on any B-29s.

Yes, the Soviets would build their own equivalents but they'd only be able to do so years behind the US and the West. Thus the Soviet's ability to threaten the rest of the world would be less as well.

And that would've been a very good thing indeed.
 
Exactly what long range, large bombload high technology (for its day) bomber has the USSR EVER BEEN able to build that would lead you to believe that the USSR in 1946 was in a position to design and build its own bomber that would equal the B29?

Well... the Tu-4, obviously. It proves the Soviets have all the components to do it, they just need to put them all together. And the ANT-64 project shows clearly they were already working doing just that even before the Tu-4 project. In fact, Tupolev didn’t want to make a carbon copy in part because it would mean having to start all over again and he was confident that he could get his ANT-64 to fly within the next few years.

Yes they built the Bear but let’s be honest they did that by cutting more then a few corners.

Yeah, you don’t know what your talking about at all. The Soviets most emphatically did not cut much in the way of corners for the Bear. Indeed, it was the quality choice compared to the alternativ, which would have been pushing the inferior-but-still intercontinental and reliable-in-testing Tu-85 out the door and hence getting a full intercontinental bomber in operational service about two years ahead of time.

Note I am not saying the USSR was not going to build a bomber the equal to (or better then) the B-29. I am just saying it would have taken longer.

And as the discussion in this thread has shown, that’s a questionable claim to make. Even if it does take longer, the time difference is liable to be months, not years.
 
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thorr97

Banned
And as the discussion in this thread has shown, that’s a questionable claim to make. Even if it does take longer, the time difference is liable to be months, not years.

I think that's ignoring quite a few things there.

It's one thing to have the technical ability to develop a sophisticated weapon system like a modern heavy strategic bomber. Clearly, the Soviets - as of 1945 - had an advanced aeronautical industrial base. Clearly, the Soviets could mass produce aircraft.

Equally clear however, is that the Soviets had no history mass producing large complex aircraft like the B-29. They'd produced large aircraft before, yes, but only in very limited numbers. They rightly concentrated on fighters and light to medium bombers - not big four engined heavies.

Having to then develop their own B-29 equivalent from scratch would be a truly daunting task for them. Would they eventually do so? Certainly - if it was deemed a priority by Stalin. But the development period would be a long one with many of those same "dead ends" in both the development of the aircraft design itself AND the development of the mass production infrastructure necessary to manufacture such a large and complex aircraft.

Together, that could well mean years and not months until the Soviets would have been able to field something as big and complex as a B-29 had the not first gotten hold of several of them first.
 
I had always thought that copying the B-29 was ultimately a bad decision for the USSR. It diverted resources from engineers learning how to build their own aircraft and resulted in mass production of a copy machine that was almost obsolete when it entered service for the USSR and was too limited to make a material difference to the USSR's military needs.

Perhaps it would have been better to spend resources on R&D to produce a completely domestic design in the late 40s that sees some limited production before the Soviets move on to better things. Perhaps, it even speeds the transition to ICBMs for the Soviets, though it may be too early a change.

fasquardon
 
I think that's ignoring quite a few things there.

It's one thing to have the technical ability to develop a sophisticated weapon system like a modern heavy strategic bomber. Clearly, the Soviets - as of 1945 - had an advanced aeronautical industrial base. Clearly, the Soviets could mass produce aircraft.

Equally clear however, is that the Soviets had no history mass producing large complex aircraft like the B-29. They'd produced large aircraft before, yes, but only in very limited numbers. They rightly concentrated on fighters and light to medium bombers - not big four engined heavies.

Having to then develop their own B-29 equivalent from scratch would be a truly daunting task for them. Would they eventually do so? Certainly - if it was deemed a priority by Stalin. But the development period would be a long one with many of those same “dead ends" in both the development of the aircraft design itself AND the development of the mass production infrastructure necessary to manufacture such a large and complex aircraft.

Together, that could well mean years and not months until the Soviets would have been able to field something as big and complex as a B-29 had the not first gotten hold of several of them first.

And if any of this were true, guess what? THEN REVERSE ENGINEERING THE B-29 WOULDN’T HAVE YIELDED MASS PRODUCED TU-4 AS FAST IT DID! I mean, Jesus hyper-jumping crystals, apply some critical thinking! The Soviets only had access to the end product here. They didn’t have access to the machine tooling that was used to produce the B-29... all that was over in the Boeing plants. That meant that when it came to the actual issue of, and I quote, “mass producing large complex aircraft like the B-29”, they were flying practically as blind (heh) on their own expertise as blind as they would have been without a single damn copy in their procession.

Put another way, if you tossed 1992 America a few 2005 smartphones they wouldn’t be able to replicate it because they would still only have the actual capability to manufacture something on the competitive level to the Simon. It might be a bit more refined then the historical Simon, but not in any significant way. Why? Because you’ve provided with pretty much fuck-all knowledge on how the 2005 smartphones were manufactured. Yet essentially this is what you are claiming the impounded ‘29s gave the Soviets. This, suffice to say, is batshit.

Ultimately, the basic fact this in the mid-late 1940s the Soviets were able to develop not just a copy of the B-29, but the means to reliably mass produce it leads to the conclusion that either...

A: They were able to develop the technical-industrial base for the mass production of a B-29 equivalent in the time span between the construction of the Tu-4 tooling for the first prototype in early-1947 and it’s entry into mass production in May 1948, which includes going through all those dead ends in production development people are talking about.
Or...
B: The technical-industrial base already mostly existed and hence could be readily appropriated onto whatever strategic bomber design the Soviets came up with, which in this case happened to be the copy of a foreign program.

In both cases, the question that the people who are arguing the claim of it taking years of additional effort are comprehensively ignoring is why is it suddenly impossible for the Soviets to do either of these things just because their working with a domestic design rather then a somewhat modified copy of a foreign one?

Copying the B-29 in the time the Soviets did still required a scientific-engineering team able to understand how design a capable strategic bomber, an industrial base able to mass produce it and it’s components, and (not least) an enormous amount of effort. All identical requirements for the development of a domestic mass-produced strategic bombers in a similar timeframe.
 
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thorr97

Banned
ObssesedNuker,

/sigh...

Okay, from the start...

Assume you're a competent engineer and you've a competent manufacturing base to back you.

In scenario A you're tasked with developing, from scratch, a large, highly complex, and almost entirely new heavy long range strategic bomber.

In scenario B you're handed a pre-existing a large, highly complex, heavy long range strategic bomber and tasked with "make a copy of this thing."

In scenario A, even with you being competent and well backed up, would still take you years.

In scenario B, with ALL the developmental work already done for you, with all the prototype testing done for you, with all the operational testing done for you, and with multiple examples of actual, operational hardware for you to examine and make use of as much as you want, will take only as long as is required to get that manufacturing base lined up to begin copying the design.

So, your premise that the Soviets being handed those B-29s only saved them "months" in the development and deployment of their own version of a heavy long range strategic bomber is therefore invalid on its face.

This takes nothing away from the skill of the Soviet aeronautical engineers. It's just acknowledging the reality of the scale of the effort it takes to develop something like that from scratch and the advantage of simply copying it once someone else has already done all that work for you.
 
In scenario B, with ALL the developmental work already done for you, with all the prototype testing done for you, with all the operational testing done for you, and with multiple examples of actual, operational hardware for you to examine and make use of as much as you want, will take only as long as is required to get that manufacturing base lined up to begin copying the design.

And the problem is that this is so badly ignorant of the actual difficulties involved in reverse engineering that it might as well be on the moon. As I already observed, the Soviets had to expend ENORMOUS effort and time in disassembling some chosen models alone, since every step of the way each part had to carefully and non-destructively be extracted then determined whether it was a part unto itself or a subassembly of another part, and all in a way that left it completely unaltered for measurement. The fact that the bomber chosen for disassembly was not factory fresh further complicated matters, as the Soviets had to then estimate distortions on things like wing spars and fuselage joints and then do extensive testing to see how their calculations measured up.

Then they had to adapt the design to their manufacturing base. The most obvious example of this are the engines chosen for the Tu-4, which were a almost wholly indigenous Soviet design (the "almost" being the fact the development heritage can be traced to a reverse engineered of a 1930s American engine which had been purchased prior to WW2). Less obvious is things like the material base: the Soviet metallurgical industry could not copy the uniform 1.5875 millimeter (1/16th inch) thickness on the B-29: they were forced to varying the thickness in .8 and 1.8 millimeters was used instead. Similar issues cropped up with the hydraulics and wiring, which had to be replaced with Soviet substitutes. In the low-tolerance-for-error environment that aircraft design generally has to go through, these sorts of changes were radical enough that the Soviets and necessitated that the Tu-4 go through all the usual sorts of prototype and operational testing any new aircraft does to make sure the changes did not compromise the design. That's why though the first prototype Tu-4 was flying in April 1947, the first mass production didn't roll off the assembly line until summer of 1948. The Soviets had to spend over a year putting them through it's paces in testing.

So the Soviets did have to do prototype testing. They did have to do operational testing. They could not rely on the data used in their test flights on the impounded B-29 because all of the changes I mentioned above meant that though the Tu-4 was a copy of the '29, it was not identical to the B-29 due to the changes I've listed above. It was a twin, not a clone.

People who act as if copying hardware is in any way easier then designing domestic hardware simply do not know what they were talking about...
 
Reverse engineering is not easy, being able to take something apart and measure it tells you how it goes together it doesnt tell you how to make the parts for that you need the Technical Package. The Soviets had to write their own technical package.

The Japanese spent 2 years trying to build a copy of the M1 Garand if it was as easy as people think they would have done it in a few months yet they never solved the feed problems or got the steel tempering quite right
 

Puzzle

Donor
As an actual engineer I can see both sides of the issue. Having the end product in front of your cuts out a ton of work, and especially in the pre computer days the analysis that went into a B-29 would be a challenge that the Tupolev team got to essentially skip. Things like the wing frames, control surfaces, landing gear, those would all have irritating problems to design and integrate from scratch and instead they got the answers handed to them.

That said, mass production is hard. As you solve the various problems in a prototype you get to iterate on the build and your vendors gain experience. In my work many times the drawings don’t change at all and we still need two or three rounds with a machine shop to get something that works, the Soviets will still need to do that and if they can do it off of just parts they could do it from drawings.

On the whole having a B-29 in hand probably helped a good deal, but just because they copied it doesn’t mean they couldn’t have built their own. They might even have done better with a clean sheet after looking at the B-29, they’d have benefitted from the lessons the Boeing learned and issues that cropped up too late in the design for the American designers to do anything about.
 
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