No wonder they lost the Cold War
I collect slide rules, and last week did some horse-trading for something uncommon – an East German artillery rule. It is about 40 years old and was used by fire control officers to calculate firing coordinates.
This thing is a delight to behold – the frame is cast aluminum and the scales are on aluminum disks with clear plastic cursors. This would be the equivalent of a straight slide rule 28 inches long, which should deliver easy 3-place accuracy and pretty good 4-place eyeball calculations (or one part in ten thousand). Those commies really went all out to make a nifty, indestructable computing device. They tried so hard, except -
It isn’t accurate. It’s off by nearly one part in three hundred…
…and what’s worse, that error varies along the scales. Some areas are more accurate than others, depending on the exact combination of scales you’d use for that particular problem.
If you’re a foot-soldier and your artillery is firing (hopefully) over your head, that knowledge may not be a comfort. But maybe the degree markings on the cannon itself are just as bad and they’ll cancel each other out – heh. “Incoming!!!”
Can’t you just imagine someone in a meeting at the state-owned company that made it, thinking: “This thing is not accurate. But I’d better not say anything. The manager is a party official!”
True, the US military has its share of technology projects that don’t work (V22 Osprey comes to mind) but those are pretty cutting-edge stuff. Slide rules have been around in one form or another since the 1600’s. None of the other rules in my collection – not even the cheap ones – have accuracy problems.
Commie-era Soviet-block technology is often shoddy, with rare exceptions. Ditto for most of the stuff I have seen from pre-capitalist China. (Yes I know, they’re a communist country. They are gradually morphing into a capitalistic country. No need to fire a shot – the almighty buck will accomplish what guns could not.)
Communism threatens its citizens with a pretty big stick, but where’s the carrot? No matter how hard you work, it doesn’t matter. Under capitalism, the “stick” amounts to bankruptcy and lawsuits, but the carrot… nobody beats capitalist carrots. Our carrots are sweeter and crunchier than anyone’s.
This rule’s getting its own display frame! I enjoy the sense of smug superiority I feel when I see it.
Notes:
I got the rule from Walter Shawlee at Slide Rule Universe, which is a feature of his company, Sphere Research. There’s lots of fascinating reading and information on slide rules there, and slide rules for sale too. Regarding this slide rule, Walter says:
my confidence in soviet block technology has never been high, this item is no exception. notice how tough it is to turn! I can just see some artillery corporal out in the field banging on this thing in frustration and cursing, as he struggles to get it to calculate something.
Here’s another good slide rule page: Eric’s Introduction to the Slide Rule.
i wouldn’t doubt that the artillery pieces themselves had accuracy problems in about that range. i’ve been a field artillerist, using former east bloc equipment even, and i remember being moderately surprised the damn things ever hit anything more specific than “the ground”.
a big artillery piece needs a lot of work to keep it from shifting under its own recoil, and somehow the dispirited officer corps never much bothered to teach us young conscripts to do that – or give us the chance to, had we made the mistake of taking such initiative on our own. the experience of standing three feet behind an eight-metric-ton chunk of steel and seeing it almost lunging fully two feet back towards you, as if it had some grudge against you, is weirdly eerie. then it’d settle back forwards again into its wheel-ruts, and you’d do it all over…
i remember once firing time-delay fused shells, meant to create airbursts. the time delay was adjusted using a dial at the nose of the fuse – turn the bolt until the triangle points to the number of seconds desired, style of thing.
except the dial was so finely graded that you couldn’t hope to get an accurate adjustment using simply eyeballs and pliers, which was what us lowly recruits were given. at the rate an arty shell flies, the end result was “it’ll explode some time after it’s left the barrel, we’re pretty certain. maybe it’ll even be somewhere near the target, we guess. what’s a tenth of a second this way or that, eh?”
the explanation given was, “oh, there’s a special tool you could use to get it on the button, but it’s too expensive to bring out into the field for just plain practice firing – go with what you’ve got”. i never did see any such special tool, and i’m somewhat curious as to what it might look like… ah, memories of a misspent youth.
LOL! Thanks for sharing, that was great Nomen!