On Thursday 10 February 2005 17.10, you wrote: > >When the Russians stole the general arrangement plans > > of the Concorde.... > > A more charitable interpretation of this is that both the Russian and the > English/French teams had similar problems to solve with similar tools so > they came up with similar solutions. The legacy of the Cold War is such > that we refuse to admit that the Russians had any signifcant technical > capability -- "they must have stolen it" -- but there's ample evidence to > the contrary.
Actually it was Tupolev Jr that said it himself; that they had pretty good general arrangement plans and also detail plans of certain systems, in a very good documentary done a few years back, beginning and ending with the famous flights by NASA-equipped Tu-144 for studies of second generation SSTs. Tupolev also said that the wing planform was too complex for their time schedule, so they opted for a double delta, not unlike the wing of a Saab Draken! That the Tupolev crashed in Paris was definitely caused by the French, and afterwards the Soviet and French authorities cooked up a weird story that it was the fault of one of the Russians aboard, that his film camera had blocked the controls! When they asked the firemen who dug out the remains of the cockpit from a house everyone was in his seat, and nobody had been standing up and there was no film camera either! When they cornered a French official he first kept to the original story, but eventually owed up that it had been a fake story, so to not worsen the relations between the two countries. Nobody thought anything about blaming an innocent man, evidently! It was BBC that made the program. I think. > There's a widely held misunderstanding about what's actually invovled in > creating things that's causing inflated expectations about what an idea is > and how much its worth. Changes in patent and copyright law have reinforced > this, those changes being institued because they suit corporate interests > (IMO). Creating the "form" is often the easy bit. Getting the form into a > realizable state, getting it manufactured, getting it marketed and > delivered to willing customers and supporting it is where the work is. > We're getting lazy -- we expect others to do this for us for peanuts so we > can profit from our genius, complaining loudly to all when people cut us > out as unnecessary (you could call it the real hidden danger in > outsourcing!). Couldn't have said it better myself :-)! Lots of good products never becomes a commercial success because they get those factors wrong. Look at all aircraft projects in the US the last twenty years, where new companies emerge with new, better aircraft, but fail anyway! A handful get it right, and survive, like Lancair and a few others, while heaps never make it: Avtec, Omac .... The list is very long! A few designs become immortal, like the Taylorcraft, that we see to this day in various forms: J-2, J-3 (Cub), Auster, plus a lot of ultralight copies, while some, like the pretty Beechcraft Starship One, never became a commercial success (today all remaining Starships have been returned to Beechcraft, to avoid litigations). > Martin Usher > > BTW -- LM and the companies that they sold the design "rights" to are > cheeky. We (the taxpayer) have already paid them for this work. The problem > isn't really LM, its the companies that bought the rights with the > expectation of profiting from sub-licencing. Its our duty to make this > business unprofitable otherwise we're be spending the rest of time fighing > off parasitic protection rackets. Hear, hear! Tord RCSE-List facilities provided by Model Airplane News. Send "subscribe" and "unsubscribe" requests to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Please note that subscribe and unsubscribe messages must be sent in text only format with MIME turned off. Email sent from web based email such as Hotmail and AOL are generally NOT in text format
