Crthuky

Despite the high bureaucracy in the Soviet Union, some design bureaus still achieved spectacular feats in science and engineering (mostly in defense and aerospace) e.g. Mir space station, Soyuz rockets, Mil V-12, Caspian Sea Monster, Antonov 225 Mriya etc.

Free flow of ideas and criticism are important for innovative ideas to be realized. How did the scientists in these bureaus manage to innovate despite Soviet censorship and bureaucracy. Take for example a scientist disagreeing with the head of a design bureau on a certain design prototype. How was such criticism handled? Or was the best design prototype chosen from a scientist who had more political connections.

The USSR didn't tend to go in for economic competition, but it made good use of intellectual competition and competition for prestige. It was also relatively good at creating organisations that did a specific thing, and kept on doing that.

The competition between the MiG and Sukhoi fighter design offices, for example, was quite significant, driven by rivalry and prestige. They designed pretty good aircraft for far less money than the Western aircraft companies, and kept on doing it until the fall of the USSR meant that the money supply dried up.

In the same way, the OKB-1, OKB-52 and OKB-586 design offices competed fiercely, with different ideas of how the space and missile programmes should be organised. Political influence was important in these rivalries, but it wasn't measured on a single scale, and the virtues of designs were also significant.

The system had some definite flaws. One of them came when one ministry's organisation needed something that the relevant ministry did not produce.

For example, one of the problems with the unsuccessful N-1 moon rocket was the excessive weight of the first stage. That was because the USSR did not make aircraft-grade aluminium in thicknesses greater than 13mm. That wasn't thick enough to make a first stage whose outer skin was also the wall of the propellant tanks. So the tanks had to be spherical to make them stronger, and the rocket needed a separate outer skin for streamlining. That weight disadvantage meant that all kinds of other things had to be pared to the bone, the rocket needed extra stages, and things got harder and harder from there.