Quote:
Originally Posted by Broadsword2004
The quality of the military versus other things in China makes me curious, because I have read that in the Soviet Union, while much of the regular civilian stuff was really lousy-quality, there was a lot more effort put into making things for the military be higher quality. I don't think this means the Soviet military had great-quality stuff, but the quality control effort was better apparently. I wonder if it is the same with China, where civilian things can be low quality, but things for the military better?
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Just an opinion...
Re: Soviet equipment quality: I know they always seemed to over engineer and build stuff heavy and clunky. What made some of their designs and fabrications successful was that they built a large number of whatever they were building (T-34's and AK-47's for example), and their tendency to over engineer sometimes produced some remarkable stuff, IMO, like the MIG-25 Foxbat (admittedly a flying brick but a damned fast brick). Arnie's movie "Red Heat" is stereotypical of a clumsy bull who craps on whatever he doesn't break while wearing a XL digital watch with an alarm that'd wake the dead. Once USSR collapsed the deterioration of ships, at least, was so rapid that it was apparent the logistics element of their systems engineering was poor. I'd vote that whatever "quality" they had was more by accident and their industrial proficiency in reverse engineering someone else's quality idea. The Chinese have their own reverse engineering love affair going on.