The Vintage Beauty of Soviet Control Rooms (2018)

https://designyoutrust.com/2018/01/vintage-beauty-soviet-control-rooms/

by ricardomcgowan • 6 years ago

677 265 6 years ago

designyoutrust.com

laretluval• 6 years ago

Not great, not terrible

duxup2• 6 years ago

Very pretty, but not sure they were anything that 60s and 70s style were ... elsewhere in many cases.

That's not a knock on them.

Usability though I hear was pretty rough in some cases... but again for the same reasons UI can suck any other place too.

Old soviet era posters looked great too, even if sort of static as you look at them over time and they don't evolve much.

_n_b_3• 6 years ago

The ones I can see that are clearly nuclear power plant control rooms really don't look all that different than the Western designs of the same era. They don't even look that different now in those plants, except for more computer screens (at the operator desks mostly, not necessarily many "on the boards") and digital strip chart recorders.

The biggest difference I see is that the Soviet stuff clearly wasn't seismically qualified.

mgibbs63• 6 years ago

I agree - many older particle accelerators in the U.S. have/had control rooms that look very similar to these photos (go see the 88-inch cyclotron at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab if you ever get a chance!). I think this is more 'vintage control system aesthetic' than a particularly soviet look.

vilhelm_s2• 6 years ago

In fact one of the photos in this collection is from the American ship NS Savannah (launched in 1959)... it's not easy to spot which one is the odd one out!

gfxgirl• 6 years ago

This?

https://s.hdnux.com/photos/41/20/33/8718076/9/rawImage.jpg

scottlocklin• 6 years ago

I used to work near there[1] (and take prom dates on the spook show at the then abandoned Bevatron[2]); the Soviet stuff does have a distinct look to it. The US racks were filled with this grey stuff, generally put together rather haphazardly by EM techs, where the soviet stuff is vastly more .... designed. At least in these photos. Possibly because the control systems were for larger, longer lived technology. Though the 88 has had a pretty good run. By contrast the ALS control room looks like a devops room; just a bunch of Sun workstations. Just for contrast; the Dubna cyclotron in Russia is pretty equivalent to something like the Bevatron or 88", and it has that swoopy designed look to its control room[3].

[1] https://s.hdnux.com/photos/41/20/33/8718076/9/640x0.jpg

[2] https://nara.getarchive.net/media/bevatron-control-room-fred...

[3] https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-dubna-moscow-region-ussr-t...

trimbo• 6 years ago

I just finished "Midnight in Chernobyl". One of the things mentioned in there was that the automation for their RBMK reactors was primitive compared to Western reactors. Even for normal operation, the operators had to be hands on continually to keep those beasts under control.

hansthehorse• 6 years ago

They are very similar to the nuclear control room I worked at except mine had orders of magnitude more annunciators and didn't have the schematics of systems on the board. I really can't imagine running a nuclear plant with so few alarms.

_n_b_3• 6 years ago

I've been to plants with the P&ID schematics on some of the boards. I worked at a new build where we had to adjust some of them after design changes, which was done with racing stripes and squirrel hair paint brushes from Amazon.

kevinskii• 6 years ago

Interesting. How can you tell that they're not seismically qualified by looking at the exteriors of the instruments?

_n_b_3• 6 years ago

Not necessarily the control boards, but look at the consoles and tables around--they don't look like they're ready to survive an earthquake.

eeZah7Ux• 6 years ago

A lot of architecture and design around the world a better sense of aesthetics than most English-speaking countries, but this nuclear power plant control rooms are indeed quite plain.

DrPhish• 6 years ago

I also agree. I was IT lead for a Kraft paper plant in the recent past, and the control rooms were indistinguishable from these. The big difference, which you wouldn't realize from pictures, is that the guts of all the old relay-based control systems had been ripped out, and the entire place was being run on a few racks of Delta-V automation controllers.

The also had an enormous data centre room in the admin building that had been knocked back to two sparsely populated racks from maybe 50 at its peak.

So much crufty and interesting tech at that place...VAX, AS/400, Netware 4...and I could go on about the scale of the place (7 story tall boiler!)

obiefernandez• 6 years ago

These are great for my collection of realistic yet not-realistic Zoom meeting virtual background!

_jal• 6 years ago

A lot of them have an interesting visual grammar - some of them almost look like subway maps.

For some reason I love trying to work out the communicative intent behind the design of some of these things when I don't know what the system actually does - there's clearly a lot of thought behind the presentation that turns it into an interesting puzzle.

...And then I compare some of that to modern industrial design. Everything must be a touch screen, who cares if the UI makes any sense or the operating context makes demanding both visual and manual attention distracting or dangerous?

duxup2• 6 years ago

I've read that some of these systems were brutal to try to figure out. Not unlike today (or anywhere else) engineers were king and they often made the call on how things worked in ways that you might not do day to day.

Walking across the room to compare two readings both on opposite sides of the room in a myriad of other similar controls and displays was not uncommon.

Granted I would never do that ... /s

dogma1138• 6 years ago

The lines link components of the same system in their actual order for example: fuel pump - furnace - gas turbine - generator.

When the space permits layout and iconography is also used to put the various components in more context next to each other often based on things like the layout of what ever they are used to control or monitor. For example if it’s a plant control components will be laid out based on the exact layout / blueprints of the plant if it’s a ship or a train if would be laid out by decks or cars.

This helps people orient themselves and find the exact thing they need based on familiarity with what is being monitored rather than the control room itself.

It not only helps with day to day operations since the the visual association is faster but also allows staff that isn’t familiar with the control room and specialists which may be called in to effectively operate within it.

This isn’t unique to Soviet control rooms this is constantly used in monitoring all over the world across all fields even IT.

vilhelm_s2• 6 years ago

Indeed, one of them is a subway control panel, and another one a railway panel. :) [See http://blog.presentandcorrect.com/27986-2 for the links to original image sources.]

earthscienceman2• 6 years ago

I recently had the luck of spending several weeks/months on a Russian icebreaker from the soviet era. It was incredible. The engine control room was a work of art. Room after room of thoughtfully constructed controls with a huge emphasis on design. The bridge was also stunning. As someone who grew up post-cold-war in the United States, it was really something to be immersed in the aesthetic and culture of Russia in that era. I'll dig up some photos and post them here in a bit maybe.

EDIT:

Alright, here they are. I'm currently working on building a static website for my photography/work... but it's not done. So I'm sharing a small selection quickly in the stupidest way possible (google photos).

https://photos.app.goo.gl/CL6Rc4TE7ddZd4Xo7

nathan82• 6 years ago

Please do, that sounds amazing.

na85• 6 years ago

Wow! Was it the Arktika-class?

joshdance• 6 years ago

yes please

winrid• 6 years ago

Please do!!

semisober• 6 years ago

I had the luck of visiting post-soviet countries in Eastern Europe, and I can say I was somewhat admired by the block buildings that they have. Rows and rows of massive constructions that look alike, we even visited some apartments, and they had the same room placement, some had really old chandeliers, which gave a strange sense of luxury in a room that's really plain and simple. I think we visited the district where Chernobyl was filmed, but right now I can't remember the exact country.

ChuckNorris89• 6 years ago

Chernobyl series was filmed in Lithuania

reaperducer• 6 years ago

block buildings that they have. Rows and rows of massive constructions that look alike

I've seen a lot of that in South Korea, and the Czech Republic, too. I wonder what other countries have this.

holoduke• 6 years ago

A funny Russian movie called the irony of fate actually highlights the phenomenon of duplicated buildings and neighbourhoods. A guy gets home drunk at the wrong apartment which looks identical, even the surrounding streets and names. a good watch

mrtksn• 6 years ago

I think it's somewhat similar to the cookie-cutter houses in the USA: The best possible accommodation for the masses at the least cost possible.

I grew up in one of those blocks till age of 15. They are not all the same but they come in a few types and few sizes. It's strangely comforting to have the house out of the equation, everybody has the same house so it's not a matter of discussion. That said, for some strange reason it was customary to show all the rooms to the people who visit you for the first time.

These blocks are ugly and are getting uglier as they decay but there are many people who "made it" and still live in these blocks and park their Bentleys in the parking that 30 years ago was full of Lada, Moskwitsch and Trabants.

Also, not everyone "made it" so some floors are renovated others are in desperate situation.

noizejoy• 6 years ago

The argument could be made, that cookie cutter apartments can be interpreted as “white cubes”[0] - and those are a big thing in the art world, since they allow the art to shine and the room design stays out of the way.

[0] https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-white-cube-dom...

Koshkin• 6 years ago

At the other end of the spectrum: https://image.shutterstock.com/z/stock-photo-suburbia-in-the...

cosmodisk4• 6 years ago

For those who want to have an idea what it's like: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FO3QpKgbdf8

The buildings,while slightly different in design,are very similar to what a lot of countries in Europe were building at the time to meet the needs of growing population. The biggest mistake the urban planners did was underestimation of how many cars there will be in the future. That's why it's so common to have a 12 story building with only 20 or so parking lots.

[Edit] It's more interesting what happened at the end of the soviet occupation,which is usually less visible to foreign visitors: planning permissions for residential properties were relaxed,which meant that there was no longer any limitations on what kind of houses people could build. And most went absolutely bananas. People started building large,most often tasteless buildings with weird features. Fuel was dead cheap so nobody cared too much about insulation and etc.An example built in 1995: https://m.aruodas.lt/namai-kaune-zaliakalnyje-kalnieciu-g-pa...

Swathes of such houses were built. A lot of people did self builds and etc.

In a period of 10-15 years,a new class of rich and super rich was formed. This was followed by formation of gated communities, identical to those in all western countries. There, houses do look very different: https://m.aruodas.lt/namai-vilniuje-valakampiuose-lauru-g-pa...

And then there's Russia: https://search.savills.com/property-detail/ru00025319_1

jacquesm5• 6 years ago

There is a great movie about a guy that drunkenly gets deposited in the wrong city, which has the same street names, apartments and so on. Hilarity ensues when he's dropped off in front of what he thinks is his house on his street:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Irony_of_Fate

Well worth watching in my opinion. Best sentence in the movie: "These are MY 32 square meters!".

Simulacra2• 6 years ago

"from the soviet era"

Point of clarification please: Was the icebreaker updated, or is it still Soviet era hardware?

nix232• 6 years ago

Never touch a running nuclear reactor...that i think say's it all

markstos• 6 years ago

There's a pool!

gorkish• 6 years ago

The Russians appear to be super fond of including extravagant amenities on such vessels. The Typhoon class submarines had pools, saunas, gyms, lounges, etc. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrULRXlAlMU

vermontdevil• 6 years ago

Great pics. Thanks for sharing.

n_t• 6 years ago

Grøtsundet

bambataa• 6 years ago

That's cool, thanks! What is the pool of water in the final one?

DIVx0• 6 years ago

Looks like a swimming pool, I assume crew and guests use it for exercise and recreation.

nix232• 6 years ago

Even the Typhoon-Class Sub's had one, and a Sauna ;)

earthscienceman2• 6 years ago

Yep, it's a pool that was filled with saltwater pulled in from Arctic ocean. There was also a sauna! The pool was even full while the ship was breaking ice... check it out:

https://youtu.be/tE4l5-flcnk

trhway• 6 years ago

this pool is there by design. On some mid-size and large USSR/Russian military ships which don't have a pool by design, you can find what your local building department would call "unpermitted remodeling" - as you can't really make a hole in a ship's deck floor (i mean theoretically you can, yet it would be a can of worms of totally different scale), the crew would build the pool up so there is only hardly a couple feet between the ceiling and the water and you get into it by climbing up the ladder.

aasasd6• 6 years ago

with a huge emphasis on design

It's still a mystery to me whether this country had actual industrial design in the Soviet era—I guess it should've had economic research at least. But Soviet industrial looks were mostly regarded as ‘ugly but functional’ by the folks.

IMO it's only now that pre-digital hardware looks appealing, through the nostalgia for ‘simpler times’. What with onscreen controls emulating bulky knobs, buttons and displays of e.g. hifi equipment and 80s' synths.

thanatropism• 6 years ago

Counterpoint: the Lomo LC-A.

einr• 6 years ago

https://www.inexhibit.com/case-studies/project-sphinx-when-t...

aasasd6• 6 years ago

A typo: that should've been ‘ergonomic research’.

analognoise4• 6 years ago

I've heard the US Navy is going away from screens; they were a bad idea, cause a lot of confusion and they're reverting back to analog switchgear because of the tactile feedback.

Ugly but functional might be the way of the future!

cosmodisk4• 6 years ago

There was no design,as a subject, in Soviet Union. It all fell under industrial engineering blanket and the looks were just a part of the entire process to get a working product. Architecture, however,was somewhat unique in this aspect,as there was more expressiveness in some works(non residential only,though).

paleogizmo3• 6 years ago

I was going to say something similar. The panels do look nice but don't seem much different than those of the West pre-digital era. I seem to recall that the nuclear ice breakers were a point of pride for the USSR, so it's likely that the panels received an above-average level of attention and are atypical.

I don't think that the appeal is just nostalgia though. Modern control rooms and equipment racks just don't have the pretty-looking hardware that the older ones do. Control rooms usually have big displays with network diagrams on them that aren't sexy anymore, along with a bunch of workstations. Equipment racks usually are dominated by LCDs and membrane switches that look a bit chintzy, no big pushbuttons in chromed bezels anymore.

ahmedalsudani2• 6 years ago

The question nobody asking:

How did you manage to get on that ship?!

I’ve long had the thought in my head of going on a different kind of “cruise” where instead of getting on a cruise ship I manage to make my way onto a container ship or another type of work boat.

Getting to spend time on a Soviet ice breaker sounds even more exciting!

lopmotr• 6 years ago

There are companies that organize booking of passenger cabins on container ships so that seems to be fairly easy.

sib• 6 years ago

If, for example, you go on a voyage to the North Pole, you will travel on a Soviet / Russian nuclear-powered icebreaker:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Let_Pobedy

You'll also end up with a lot less $$ in your wallet:

https://www.quarkexpeditions.com/expeditions/north-pole-the-...

madaxe_again• 6 years ago

I went to the Antarctic on a (refitted) soviet era ice-hardened (anything up to ~1m thickness) ship a few years back, as a paying tourist - a lot of the more niche operators who go to more remote corners run old Soviet ships - in fact, the only other ship that we saw in a month down there was a similar vintage soviet ship - Akademik someone-or-other.

The bridge had largely been refitted to modern standards and design, but the engineering control room was a thing of beauty - blinkenlights and dials and levers and buttons like goddamned pornography. The aesthetic (cream, green, black, chrome, domed lamps, tactile light-up buttons) was almost identical to that of a soviet missile silo I visited a few years back near Pervomaisk, Ukraine - which isn’t altogether surprising, as they were likely built in the same shipyard - soviet control bunkers were basically submarines turned on end, mounted on shock absorbers, and shoved down a silo.

Fun aside: our guide was one of the button-men back in the day. He explained that two keys, spaced eight feet apart, had to be turned simultaneously to arm the launch controls. He then explained and demonstrated that the slot in the tip of the flag standard which stood proudly behind the control chairs was designed and curved such that you could hook the key in the control lock through it, sit down at the other key, hold the end of the standard, and give it a pull, which would turn the “out of reach” key as you turned yours. It was “officially unofficially official” in his (translated) words, to be done in the case of the incapacitation of the other launch control officer.

fedd• 6 years ago

Sometimes the interiors of a ship would be built in Germany, the Eastern part of course

jacquesm5• 6 years ago

Awesome thank you for posting these. Any shots of the engine room?

lobster45• 6 years ago

Thanks for sharing! Awesome pics

brokenmachine2• 6 years ago

That control panel is amazing. Would be right at home in a sci-fi movie.

detaro• 6 years ago

Seems taken from http://blog.presentandcorrect.com/27986-2, which did link to the sources for the images.

gamegoblin• 6 years ago

See also a dubiously useful but very aesthetic "control room for the economy" in early 70's Chile: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn

ceejayoz3• 6 years ago

After the CIA-backed military coup on September 11, 1973, Cybersyn was abandoned and the operations room was destroyed.

I do wish we'd had a chance to see how well it worked.

eigenvalue• 6 years ago

You can see from this chart that the entire economic program of which Cybersyn was a part was more akin to sabotage than anything helpful: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/25/Chile-th...

gnarbarian• 6 years ago

Spoiler alert: centrally planned economies never work.

andrepd• 6 years ago

dubiously useful

The US made sure that doubt was never cleared. Shame, it looked decades ahead of its time, essentially internet + machine learning to dynamically allocate resources and diagnose problems. Essentially what amazon and other big enterprises do today, so... Plus it had a socialist bent, aiming to include workers in that real time decision making process.

kingkawn2• 6 years ago

Which at the time was condemned as signs of a command economy, but now is practiced en masse but all major corporations and governments

_0w8t• 6 years ago

Scott Locklin has a nice article about it, https://wordpress.com/read/blogs/6936594/posts/2648

bmitc• 6 years ago

Thanks for introducing me to Stafford Beer.

basicplus22• 6 years ago

And of course its always worth mentioning the MONIAC..

(Monetary National Income Analogue Computer) also known as the Phillips Hydraulic Computer

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MONIAC

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rAZavOcEnLg

rootbear2• 6 years ago

I love that room. It would be right at home on the original starship Enterprise.

microcolonel• 6 years ago

I'm really not fond of much of this sort of design. So many objects from the 60s and 70s were too focused on looking “cool”. The furniture strikes me as impractical and inhumane, and most of it was poor quality; I've seen a lot of it thrown out, and it just gets ratty and the laminates peel off if the climate control wasn't just right in whatever building it was in.

The organization of controls is alright, and the SCADA-style visual HMI definitely looks intriguing, but I wouldn't say it's “beautiful” in any way I would recognize; and it's not really any different from the design language of similar-period U.S. control rooms (see examples below).

You'll even note in my third example one of the images in the article isn't even of a soviet control room but rather a U.S. nuclear ship control room.

This error seems to stem from this article being from a family of slapdash articles based on a webpage with a collection of control room photos [0] claimed to be Soviet; though they they note several corrections, the U.S. ship control room is still there, right at the top, taunting you.

https://www.atomicheritage.org/sites/default/files/Three%20M...

https://hips.hearstapps.com/pop.h-cdn.co/assets/15/28/3200x2...

[0] http://blog.presentandcorrect.com/27986-2

dpflan• 6 years ago

This reminds of content on the site OObject. It has lists of interesting images of real-world things like control rooms, neutrino detectors, etc: like these 12 space inflatables: http://www.oobject.com/category/12-space-inflatables/, or these 12 mobile bridges.

VBprogrammer3• 6 years ago

This is a bit of a random question but if anyone will know this answer I'm sure it's the HN hive mind.

I was looking for those handle shaped switches, the tall ones you can wrap your whole fist around and activate. I've no idea if they have a specific name but I've not been able to find them in industrial parts catalogues but they are common in power station control rooms world wide by the looks of things. The third photo down has a lot of examples.

Anyone have any idea if there is a specific name for those which I'm missing?

whatgoodisaroad• 6 years ago

I'm not an expert, but I like the question a lot. My best guess from some scrolling through industrial parts ordering websites is that they're called "pistol grip levers".

Here's a couple examples found using that as a query: https://images.app.goo.gl/NRHyawiKxrsvZUhu5 https://images.app.goo.gl/9qyhBAdqBy9Tqxxh9

VBprogrammer3• 6 years ago

That would never have occurred to me as the key word, thanks!

intrepidhero• 6 years ago

Examples https://www.electroswitch.com/products/utility-power-switche...

https://www.electroswitch.com/products/utility-power-switche...

watsocd2• 6 years ago

I think that was the GE model. Here is the Westinghouse version. https://nationalswitchgear.com/Products/WH-TYPE-W2-CIRCUIT-B...

kayfox• 6 years ago

They are commonly referred to as a breaker control switch. Some types have a position indicator that is separate from the rotary switch mechanism to show actual breaker state rather than requested breaker state.

osamagirl69• 6 years ago

I always loved the look of older switchgear (as in power transmission, not network switches...). There are few examples given here, but some of the early gear genuinely wouldn't look out of place in a Frakenstein movie, like the original control room in at Battersea[1].

There is just something about a room covered in mechanical meters (not analog meters hooked up to a computer - literally mechanical computers hooked up with sense transformers to the high voltage lines) that read thousands of amps and 10s if not 100s of thousands of volts, often times with the megawatts of power traveling just on the other side of the panel!

[1] http://benedante.blogspot.com/2015/05/battersea-power-statio...

asteli• 6 years ago

Why no love for network switches? The old mechanical telephone exchange equipment is enormously satisfying to watch as well.

https://youtu.be/_xI9tXi-UNs

PoachedSausage2• 6 years ago

You can see them in action at Avoncroft Museum of Historic Buildings[0] which includes a working telephone exchange.

About a mile from there is Droitwich Transmitting Station, an ArtDeco era station, see page 13 of [1] for exposed knife switches with 400V.

[0] https://avoncroft.org.uk/avoncrofts-work/special-collections...

[1] http://www.bbceng.info/Operations/transmitter_ops/Reminiscen...

dugmartin• 6 years ago

My dad worked at the phone company and as a kid in the late 1970s I went into the switching room with him on a Saturday morning (he was the district boss and would bring donuts in for the folks that had to work weekends). Forty years later and I still remember lots and lots of clicking and a heady smell of ozone.

skrtskrt• 6 years ago

Worked at a telecom API provider and we were told AT&T still has a handful of these in service in the US.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZePwin92cI

VBprogrammer3• 6 years ago

There are some interesting videos on YouTube of the Folsom power house. Some of their panels have live knife switches, never mind being on the other side of a panel.

PoachedSausage2• 6 years ago

People were obviously trusted not to be stupid enough to touch them back then. We designed things in Art Deco style, I don't know what the style is now, Health & Safety Mandatory Beige perhaps.

outworlder• 6 years ago

literally mechanical computers hooked up with sense transformers to the high voltage lines) that read thousands of amps and 10s if not 100s of thousands of volts, often times with the megawatts of power traveling just on the other side of the panel!

So you are saying the explodey plasma conduits in Star Trek consoles are not that far-fetched after all?

mikepurvis• 6 years ago

It's super cool to see the natural light (even skylights!) present in some of the rooms pictured. That would be unthinkable when glare from monitors is an issue, but makes total sense when everything is mechanical.

ur-whale• 6 years ago

From the good old days when complex systems were still mostly 'fits in head' and could be drawn on a wall ... beautiful.

yumraj• 6 years ago

What did the US control rooms from the same era look like?

Any links to photos somewhere?

watsocd2• 6 years ago

If you are talking pre-1970, they looked pretty much the same!

blattimwind• 6 years ago

These don't look much different from control rooms elsewhere from the same time? Heck, a lot of process control rooms still look a lot like this (and for good reason), just with a row or two of desks with screens in front and perhaps some screens sprinkled in here and there.

dylan604• 6 years ago

Hopefully, we won't start seeing these types of pictures with touchscreens in the consoles.

duskwuff• 6 years ago

I've got some bad news for you:

https://features.propublica.org/navy-uss-mccain-crash/navy-i...

at_a_remove2• 6 years ago

I feel a strange urge to rewatch Colossus: The Forbin Project.

technothrasher• 6 years ago

Have you read the books? They're even more of a hoot than the movie, which was actually a reasonably faithful retelling of the first book and enjoyable in its own right where it does diverge.

at_a_remove2• 6 years ago

Yeah, about fifteen years back. They were rather enjoyable.

Frankly I am surprised the movie got made. It's a little on the cerebral side. There's something about the cold, tense abstraction of it that matched these huge banks of somewhat cryptic control panels.

dvirsky3• 6 years ago

I've had this idea for a long time but haven't gotten to actually doing it, to create a physical dashboard for production services using that aesthetic. Controlled by some Raspberry Pi or something, exposing an API, so I can hook it to real dashboard data for my work.

With the API you bridge it to something like Grafana etc, to make the gauges and lights go, and for bonus points have some buttons do things like silence alerts, a big red button to roll back a deployment, and a missile-launch like button with a key you need to turn to deploy to production.

The closest thing I've found on eBay that could be used as a base and was somewhat similar in design, was the control panel of a Soviet tank. But I think it will just have to be made from scratch using bought gauges and buttons.

jraines• 6 years ago

seconded!

For me, I'd add that I want high quality, almost superfluously "chunky" ones -- think heavy, metal knobs that would get a positive grunt from Knob Feel[1]; switches with a physical resistance and heft that would be apropos for arming the Death Star laser. Hyperbole, but . . . the point is since I'm a total noob regarding this stuff, I wouldn't know where to start and would be nervous about buying them sight unseen without a good rec from someone knowledgable. Anyone have recommendations for where/how to look for such things online or in person (Bay Area)?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csrxxcLhW2c

jaquers• 6 years ago

Depends on how hard you wanna go. I dunno about any prebuilt console/control panels, but this guy built a whole A-10 cockpit by himself w/ RasbPI's ;) Pretty neat. I too want a control panel for my apps!

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJq3cq9N6xYF0fAvTgpwoBg/vid...

Edit: here's the build breakdown video: https://youtu.be/gDy10Wy4vw4?t=57

FiatLuxDave• 6 years ago

a big red button

Back in the day when we were building our fusion reactor at Fiat Lux, we saved some money by buying an old Varian ion implanter (for the HV power supplies). We scrapped whatever good parts we could find off it. One of the goodies we got out of that thing was an absolutely huge (~5 inch diameter) red button with the word STOP on it.

I always wanted to find a good use for that button, because it was just so amazing! But the thing about a fusion reactor, is that turning it off is pretty easy. The only thing that it might have been useful for was as an emergency stop button for the high voltage power supplies. And the only time that would have been useful, we didn't think to hook up the button beforehand.

I like your idea. The aesthetics of web-based design seem rather confined to the screen, and bringing that control of information out of the screen sounds like a cool idea.

jacquesm5• 6 years ago

That button would serve handily as a meeting terminator.

weinzierl• 6 years ago

" [...] some buttons do things like silence alerts, a big red button to roll back a deployment, and a missile-launch like button with a key you need to turn to deploy to production."

Don't forget certificate deployment. Work has bern done[1] you could build upon...

[1] https://scotthelme.co.uk/lets-encrypt-is-only-a-click-away/

kps• 6 years ago

Contrast with submarine-launched cruise missiles: “A left mouse push fires it. Kinda crazy really. We actually asked for a great big red button, but they wouldn't give us one.” — http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/3078097.stm

dvirsky3• 6 years ago

Considering that until the 90s UK nuclear bombs were protected by bike locks, I wouldn't complain. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7097101.stm

dvirsky3• 6 years ago

Ooh, if anyone's interested in building one, it's your lucky day: https://hackaday.com/2020/05/28/psst-wanna-buy-a-control-pan...

Cthulhu_3• 6 years ago

For a ready-made solution, you could look into the Elgato Stream Deck (https://www.elgato.com/en/gaming/stream-deck), which could also (I presume) show dynamic images on the buttons. But, it'd only be buttons unfortunately.

There's a few people creating custom control panels to use with e.g. Kerbal Space Program or Elite Dangerous as well.

markvdb• 6 years ago

Watch Solaris [0] by Andrei Tarkovsky! It's an amazing Soviet era sci-fi movie. While the controls in there are obviously fake, it's interesting to look at how the director and his team imagined a space station to look in 1972.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaris_%281972_film%29

pengaru• 6 years ago

There's also significant Russian space ship interiors shown in the 2001: A Space Odyssey sequel; 2010: The Year We Make Contact.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010:_The_Year_We_Make_Contact

twoheadedboy• 6 years ago

Also interesting to note that Tarkovsky hated 2001: A Space Odyssey.

ornornor• 6 years ago

Would love to find high resolution files for these, so they can be printed on a large format printer and hung to my wall. But the most I can find is 1000px Eire which is not enough to print larger than a postcard afaik

jdonaldson• 6 years ago

I see these rooms as part of the "aesthetics of control" that is common in a lot of communist and socialist cultures. The control and wall surfaces seem to almost celebrate the existence and relationship between component dials and indicators. Everything is highly centralized and intentional, and everything has a place and role. This notion of "everything has a place" is common in Soviet propaganda art as well.

Some of these control surfaces are as much a communication medium as they are a functional one. In some cases I'm reminded of Egyptian hieroglyphics on walls. They are an act of communication as much as an act of engineering.

323454• 6 years ago

How did they test a control room like this, with so many inputs and outputs? It seems like there would be many opportunities to botch a contact or two.

vmh1928• 6 years ago

These look like pre-computer analog control rooms at large plants everywhere. There wasn't much automation then so the operators really had to know the process and how to manually start, stop and modify the behavior of whatever it was - chemicals, power, steel, etc..

Simulacra2• 6 years ago

IIRC the photographed control rooms were often staged to look more high tech, and functional than they really were. Like new paint on a tank with no running engine.

ChrisMarshallNY• 6 years ago

That is cool. Thanks for sharing it!

I remember seeing this image in an older version of Don Norman's famous book The Design of Everyday Things:https://pictures.abebooks.com/JVALLES/3324134975.jpg

I think that was a US plant, but it was a cool idea.

supernova87a3• 6 years ago

I think this is a world totally foreign to what HN's world is about, which is why it's so charming/aesthetically pleasing. (exaggerating a bit, but not that much)

The reason that these switches and dials are ok to be hardcoded in metal and glass is that they (and the people) do the same thing, over and over, year after year, for decades at a time. Rinse and repeat.

Versus the software world (or more accurately, the world of starting up new things and experiments within months) -- where you don't know what you're building yet, whether it will work, and if it will still exist next year.

atemerev• 6 years ago

There are many Russians on HN, myself included. So, not foreign to everyone. :)

jscheel• 6 years ago

I believe they meant functionally foreign, not culturally foreign.

varjag3• 6 years ago

It's pretty foreign to Russians who grew up after Soviet collapse.

eecc• 6 years ago

I'm sure there's plenty of hardcoded panels that will be used to control the same process for decades also in the "western" world.

squarefoot• 6 years ago

No idea if they're doing the same thing in the military, but the ongoing rush to swap every damn button panel with a touchscreen is like a million disasters waiting to happen.

TheCapn2• 6 years ago

Generally not in my experience. Things are still heavily driven from SCADA/HMI systems because its just economical to drop a PC in and be virtually future proof to whatever changes you make at your plant.

I've been part of a few jobs that have panels similar to what you're discussing but my presence there is to make sure the 3rd party builder signs off then we immediately bypass the panel's physical controls with a PLC+HMI system for the client. (Fertilizer blending system)

Dahoon3• 6 years ago

The same kind of controls in the US does not look "charming/aesthetically pleasing". It is because they were good at it.

red_admiral• 6 years ago

Some of them look like railway signalling panels. We still have a lot of them in Europe, newer ones are computerised of course but still plenty of relay-based ones in operation.

supernova87a3• 6 years ago

Speaking of this, when I see metro/subway systems in Asia, I think about how they decide to hard-code vs. have dynamic displays for the in-car maps and station announcements.

You know, because their subway systems actually grow and change over there, during the course of a few years.

frosted-flakes2• 6 years ago

Yeah, but my car has air conditioning, and it's not going away. It needs a button to turn it on and off. It gets pressed several times a day for 20 years (except winter). Why does that button ever need to change?

WalterBright4• 6 years ago

Yet change it does. In my old car, the A/C is a button labeled "A/C". In new cars, I can't figure out how to turn it on.

It's similar to each iteration of Windows. I'm convinced that Microsoft takes 1000 darts, labels each with a command like "backup", and has a blind monkey throw it at a dartboard to determine where it goes.

At least Microsoft labels them with words, like "Control Panel", even though what's in it is completely random from one iteration to the next. The car companies label all the buttons with random splotches inspired by fingerpainting toddlers.

martythemaniak• 6 years ago

Why do you need a button? I set the temperature in my car and it does whatever it needs to make it so.

orbital-decay• 6 years ago

I think "HN's world" is kind of large, it doesn't only consist of web developers. The reason these were made in hardware is there were no software-driven SCADAs and cheap and abundant large displays back then, or at least they were in their infancy.

starting up new things and experiments within months
you don't know what you're building yet, whether it will work, and if it will still exist next year.

That's exactly how fast things moved when these control rooms were designed, though. Even in the Soviet industries which were generally inflexible and optimized for 5-year iterations, there was constant experimentation and plenty of lean and mean engineering organizations. The reason you're perceiving industrial equipment design as slow is that you live in an entirely different era. It doesn't have to be slow, and it wasn't always like that.

kemitchell• 6 years ago

The reason that these switches and dials are ok to be hardcoded in metal and glass is that they (and the people) do the same thing, over and over, year after year, for decades at a time. Rinse and repeat.

The keys on my keyboard and mouse have been hardcoded into metal and plastic since I started programming. Likewise the frets of guitars I've played since boyhood. That does not mean I've been doing the same thing over and over for decades at a time, rinse and repeat.

Or maybe it does.

c-smile• 6 years ago

USSR's Strategic Rocket Forces Control Rooms were also quite spectacular. It's a pity I do not have photos of them (for obvious reasons).

This https://habr.com/ru/post/446098/ is close but not quite. The satellite state map (ru: Карта спутниковой обстановки) and rooms themselves were less fancy but more brutally-functional I would say.

pbhjpbhj5• 6 years ago

Presumably USA (GB, DE, ???) have pictures!

aivisol• 6 years ago

The colors seem a bit exaggerated - these pictures were for sure originally mostly black and white, and whoever digitized them, added a lot of bright colors. In reality it was greyish as in the last picture from Chernobyl. I worked in a Soviet semi-military chip factory, it looked pretty much similar.

varjag3• 6 years ago

Seconded. Grew up in USSR, been to industrial sites, they were as bleak as the everyday life.

Remember Gibson's quote about "sky was the color of TV tuned to dead channel"? Well back home the whole manmade environment was like that.

chkaloon• 6 years ago

Awesome. Some observations/questions:

- The control rooms probably required a good amount of maintenance themselves with all the mechanical switches, light bulbs, and paper loggers.

- Why the white lab coats in a nuclear control room?

- Would love to see the wiring behind these panels.

benburleson• 6 years ago

This one isn't even vintage, look at the flat monitor!

https://main-designyoutrust.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/upload...

Dahoon3• 6 years ago

Did the flat screen travel back in time?

isoprophlex• 6 years ago

Imagine the task of testing and maintaining all those dials and switches, and the data lines flowing into them... i can't even keep a hand full of shell scripts under control

dang• 6 years ago

Discussed at the time, though only a bit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17332791

Biggleman• 6 years ago

Reading the comments it seems many people are in awe of the physical/analog meters and switches. Most the vessels sailing the oceans worldwide have similar looking controlrooms at the present time.

As a former maritime engineer (advanced plumber at sea) I also would like to add that these physical/analog systems are in fact much more reliable and problems are easier to isolate. Please also keep in mind that at the locations where these controlrooms are implemented, the operators usually have more experience with mechanical stuff than PLC I/O's (those are done by contractors more often than not)

projektfu• 6 years ago

The digital dials also don’t give us the drama in the movies of tapping and unsticking the indicator to reveal the crisis situation. Although I wonder how common that cliché is in real life.

basicplus22• 6 years ago

one is watching all the readings together which "make sense".

If one reading is out from where it should be relative to the others (for the given load/condition) it is investigated immediately so anomalies don't usually go unnoticed.

One gets a sense.. a feeling for the whole.. like a simulation running in your own head to feel whats going on as well.

nullc• 6 years ago

My experience is that displays that silently stop updating is a more common property of digital readouts. :-/

p_l4• 6 years ago

Tapping the barometric altimeter (and other pressure sensors, but altimeter the most) had been driven hard into me and my friends when training on gliders. Can get you hundreds meters difference lower, and suddenly you find that yes, you're lower than you thought.

andybak• 6 years ago

If you are a fan of switches, dials, chipped enamel paint, typed instruction sheets and a vague 50s aesthetic I can thoroughly recommend this Soviet themed space game (in VR): https://store.steampowered.com/app/579110/Interkosmos/

Taikonerd• 6 years ago

I was sure you were going to say Red Matter: https://store.steampowered.com/app/966680/Red_Matter/

_bxg1• 6 years ago

This aesthetic always reminds me, weirdly enough, of 1971's Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Several scenes go out of their way to look "high-tech", and as a child of the 90s it was one of my few exposures to what that meant in 1970s terms.

remarkEon2• 6 years ago

Where do I find more content like this? I absolutely love looking at and reading about Soviet era tech - from nuclear reactors to their rockets. This is history I’m itching to get more of. I’d also love to see some interviews of the designers of these things, if they still exist.

And yes I watched Chernobyl on HBO and loved it.

keiferski2• 6 years ago

You might like http://www.CalvertJournal.com

remarkEon2• 6 years ago

This is great, thank you.

Do you speak Russian? How long did it take you to learn?

colanderman• 6 years ago

Does anyone know what those large centrally-located circular grids in a few of the photos are?

pvarangot• 6 years ago

I think that represents the vessel of a nuclear reactor. The things inside the circle are probably representing clusters of rods or sensors spread around the vessel and show the state of different subsystems or parts of the reactor that need to be monitored.

martopix• 6 years ago

I've been to a 1950s decomissioned nuclear research reactor in Italy. It's still being monitored even if it's been turned off for years; with the addition of a few computers in a corner, the control room still looks pretty much like that. Printers instead of monitors, small bulbs instead of LEDs. At some point I stepped too closed to one of the desks, and an actual HORN went off.

janee• 6 years ago

I wonder how much design choice goes into the actual layout and controls being used on these, i.e. is it mostly physical hardware constraints that dictate the look or user interaction.

Wondering because I see a lot of symmetry in the panels, but others seem very hodgepodge

01100011• 6 years ago

So what would you call this style? Relaypunk?

jpindar4• 6 years ago

I've seen the terms dieselpunk and atompunk.

Ididntdothis• 6 years ago

This stuff used to look high tech. Now it’s computer screens that look high tech. I wonder what’s next. How will a control room in 50 years look or will there be no control rooms?

GloriousKoji• 6 years ago

It'll just be Alexa.

bregma2• 6 years ago

"Alexa, open the pod bay doors."

"I'm sorry, Dave, you know I can't do that."

TheCapn2• 6 years ago

Personal opinion time.

Aside from whatever modern screens become I can't see control rooms changing too much from where they are currently. What is likely to change is how equipment is approached within the field which may mean less reliance on control rooms in general.

What I mean is, imagine a Google Glass style augmented reality goggle on your operators. As they walk the plant they can look at a process system and up blips the efficiency/product/status info in real time. If that guy is out there for maintenance he'd see the time since last fault, reason for fault, downtime, and whatever else you'd call relevant all in front of his eyes instead of having to radio with the controls operator for info.

WalterBright4• 6 years ago

I always wanted my computer setup to look like that.

jgalt212• 6 years ago

2020 version, but even this is more for show than functionality.

https://www.weytec.com/en/solutions/kvm-video-wall/

coryfklein• 6 years ago

What is the purpose of these rooms, what do they control, and how? Like, what information is it providing to the users, and what actions can they take by flipping the switches or turning the knobs?

TaylorAlexander• 6 years ago

I’ve noticed that a lot of futuristic movies from the 1970’s (like on a space ship) feature rooms where the walls are completely covered in buttons and lights and stuff. From today’s perspective it looks ridiculous but when you see these Soviet control rooms you can see why people would have found it believable at the time.

analognoise4• 6 years ago

I want a fully accurate simulation of sitting in front of one of these control panels, and a tutorial that explains what every single thing does.

There's so damn many knobs and buttons, and I have no idea how to interpret what everything is.

Surely someone else out there would pay for ReactorControlSimulator 2020?

jpindar4• 6 years ago

There are reactor simulators, but the ones I've seen use ordinary GUIs. I haven't seen any that tried to be visually accurate.

analognoise4• 6 years ago

Do you know the names of any, or where I could look?

I mean what if you had a fully immersive, functionally and spatially accurate model of a reactor control room? How absolutely badass would that be?

Cthulhu_3• 6 years ago

https://jobsimulatorgame.com/ might come close

varjag3• 6 years ago

To those interested in Soviet industrial design, a selection of Technical Aesthetics magazine issues dating back to 1960s:

https://issuu.com/0083398

Be aware though that most of these concepts never materialised and actual aesthetics were rather grim for the most part.

DubiousPusher• 6 years ago

If you are ever in Berlin absolutely pay to go up the Soviet radio tower. The one that looks a bit like the Space Needle. The room you enter before you board the elevator is stunningly beautiful.

In fact, generally it's a far more beautiful structure than most such towers. The interior design is especially impressive.

pippy• 6 years ago

My dad worked in a substation in the 90's which had the aesthetic of many of these pictures. Wall to wall switches which controlled the power distribution to half of New Zealand. Halfway through the 90's they upgraded to a few boring beige boxes in an office, and there was no need to use the manual switches. I loved going there because his workmates would give me pirated MS-DOS games on floppy disks, but the magic was lost. Later on they restructured all control through a single office in the capital and my dad lost his job.

alfiedotwtf• 6 years ago

Robert Moog had nothing on these Soviet beauties

golemotron• 6 years ago

They remind me of Wes Anderson's sets.

Robotbeat• 6 years ago

I have seen some 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s era control rooms in old wind tunnels from NACA/NASA, and many of them look like this. My favorite is where they indicators are in the shape of a big flow diagram so they're self-describing in function as well.

anyfoo• 6 years ago

We are physical beings, and even as someone who has enjoyed working with computers since a very young age in the 80s, I always felt that the more things are virtualized into intangible data and user interfaces, the less interesting and real things feel.

FillardMillmore• 6 years ago

Am I crazy, or does the fifth to last photo have a Windows XP screensaver? Windows XP was released in 2001 and the Soviet Union was dissolved in 1991 - what gives? Am I mistaken?

john2x• 6 years ago

It's on an LCD panel, so new equipment brought into an old room.

artsyca• 6 years ago

Nowadays these rooms would be staffed by brocoders in t shirts where once it was scientists in lab coats go figure

bsaul• 6 years ago

Having recently worked on creating monitoring dashboard for some backend, there are a few things that strikes me :

- The indicators are physically disposed in a way to represent the physical location of what they are monitoring. It helps understand what it is measuring (instead of just adding a label.. or putting all the "tension" indicator in the same row, for example).

- Next to the indicators are the buttons to physically interact with that part of the system. This is very logical : you see the red light, and right below it you have the button to shut the thing off.

I don't know of any infrastructure monitoring dashboard system that works this way. I wonder how that would translate in our world of virtual instances. But i'm pretty sure there's something to take inspiration from here.

Cthulhu_3• 6 years ago

Part of me has always wanted to work in a control room, doing things with buttons and switches and the like. Or operate heavy machinery.

But the other part knows it'll take a lot of training initially (domain specific), followed by what likely is a lot of boredom. Working on a PC as a developer with internet access gives a lot more stimulation and variation in my day to day job.

7leafer• 6 years ago

The last photo of Chernobyl reactor 4 control room is the most reassuring of them all.

bregma2• 6 years ago

Everything needs more Nixie tubes.

GeekyBear• 6 years ago

I've always been fond of the Battersea electric power station in England.

The station's design proved popular straightaway, and was described as a "temple of power", which ranked equal with St Paul's Cathedral as a London landmark. In a 1939 survey by The Architectural Review a panel of celebrities ranked it as their second favourite modern building.

The A Station's control room was given many Art Deco fittings by architect Halliday. Italian marble was used in the turbine hall, and polished parquet floors and wrought-iron staircases were used throughout.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battersea_Power_Station

It's amazing that they went so far out of their way to make an industrial plant beautiful, inside and out.

Foivos• 6 years ago

This one looks very similar to the C&C red alert power plant [1]. I wonder if this not a coincidence.

[1] https://cnc.fandom.com/wiki/Power_plant_(Red_Alert_1)

Nginx4872• 6 years ago

In Soviet Russia, room controls you (Sorry, just a tradition:)

The Vintage Beauty of Soviet Control Rooms (2018)

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