On Nov 21, 3:27 am, Bill Kambic wrote:
On Tue, 20 Nov 2007 16:25:11 -0800 (PST), Weatherlawyer

I believe they got the details of nuclear physics handed to them
gratis. They built better rockets than the US too. A mixture of
ideology and money can indeed work wonders but when push comes to
shove their engineering ability is bloody good.

At the top end they can be quite good. But, as a rule, their
maintenance SUX and the old USSR used to build a lot of something
because a lot of it wouldn't work if the "balloon" should ever go up.
They relied very heavily on large cadres of draftees for "grunt work"
and used the equivalent of senior petty officers and warrant officers
to actually fix stuff. If they maintain this model (right out of
Tsarist times) then their success is likely to be limited.

They are better at keeping secrets too so who knows what they have
brewing while who doesn't know what the US and the Europeans have?

I don't think their "secret keeping" ability is all that red-hot
anymore! ;-)

No and truth to tell I doubt it was all that good in the first place,
just the logistics of the place. But this group is so US centric it
aught to be called sci.usa.military.naval

And the anti Russian/ Arab/ whoeverelseisn'tmiredinIraqwiththechimp
sentiments seems to come straight from the CIA manual on How to Swift
Boat a non Republican US Politician school of thought.

A successful carrier aviation program is a very expensive, very
intensive thing. It takes a long time to build it up. You can read
all the books about carreir aviation ever written (including CV NATOPS
manuals) and still not know all of the "how to's."

And it's not enough to train pilots and aircrews; all those "colored
shirt" guys need training and experience, too. A flight deck during
flight ops is, perhaps, the most dangerous industrial venue in the
world. When flight ops are secured it's only modestly safer.

Then there's the interesting drills that occur during respots. And
the ever-present threat of "hanger rash."

Choregraphing the "ballet" that every CV does several times a day
during FLTOPS takes a lot of knowledge AND experience.

In my day ('68-'92) the Soviet Navy never did all that well on UNREPS.
Did they ever get any better?

Again, if they want to spend the money to build the ships and planes
and escorts and develop the expertise it CAN be done. I don't know if
20 years is a reasonable window or not. I guess we'll have to just
watch and see what happens!!!

Didn't the RN open a school for that sort of thing on land during WW
2? I vaguely remember something but wouldn't know where to look. There
were an hell of a lot of carriers all of a sudden at some point in WW
2 though were there not.

Run by submariners too IIRC, some were. Not very successfully though,
so I suppose you are right.

What is true is that the Russians need to kick start their economy so
that men can afford to get married and women can afford to have
babies.and raise them.