Kharkovchanka – Soviet Antarctic Cruisers [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6R-h06IsJw

by simonebrunozzi • 6 years ago

119 104 6 years ago

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Torkel3• 6 years ago

Here's a twitter thread by a guy who built a nice model of one:

https://twitter.com/PeterOlsson/status/1280940641472655367

muro• 6 years ago

Thanks for sharing, very good scratch-build on display with the track extension and cabin build.

dayofthedaleks2• 6 years ago

It also shows interesting deep-nerd cross-pollination in the model building/military history/art scenes.

jojobas3• 6 years ago

Later designs moved the engine outside to reduce noise. I'm not aware of any operational difficulties but I'd rather cope with noise than service a V12 diesel in -60C wind.

mc32• 6 years ago

You can’t shut off the engine in that climate, if you do you would need a way to heat it up before restarting so, it’s redundant.

In other words if you will anyway need a warmer environment [hangar, large building] to enable the engine to start, there is no point to “fixing it” in the cold as it will not turn over anyway.

jojobas3• 6 years ago

Both models have auxiliary heaters and later models have generators.

There's no warmer environment for thousands of kilometers there, doesn't mean you can't change a belt or oil in the field.

nuccy2• 6 years ago

While looking for more info on Kharkovhanka 2, I found a blog of a russian guy who actually lives on the Vostok station [1]. There is an additional engine+generator inside [2], which is used for heating of the interior, but probably can also be used to heat up the main engine.

I was not aware of the fact that all the stations in Antarctic are on the ice actually, so they drift as time passes. There is a map of that [3]. Given the extremely low humidity, non-existing grounding (since the station is on the ice), when there is a blizzard or strong wind outside, snowflake rub themselves, and the station accumulates significant static charge which affects all the equipment.

[1] https://pikabu.ru/@deratizator (in russian, but google translate is capable of translating most of the text, except profanity words which appear occasionally to highlight the complexity of life in such climate conditions :) )

[2] https://pikabu.ru/story/kharkovchankaii_5499165 (still in russian, same blog)

[3] https://cs7.pikabu.ru/post_img/big/2017/12/11/7/151299321313...

throwaway0a5e3• 6 years ago

Two words: pony motor

They've been used since forever to heat and start large engines. Depending on size the pony motor might even produce enough heat when idling to keep the crew cabin warm while you service the main engine.

I still wouldn't want to share a box with an old soviet diesel though.

Torkel3• 6 years ago

The video mentions that this was done because the people in the driver cabin became covered in diesel soot as the sealing between engine and cabin was not 100%.

jojobas3• 6 years ago

You don't typically see soot dispersed from under the hood of diesel trucks, that would mean leaky exhaust (a big no-no even with external engines). Sure they had their reasons.

jacques-noris• 6 years ago

German Wikipedia says this was done to avoid overheating:

"Since September 1975 the further developed Charkowtschanka-2 was built. One of the most important differences was the external cabin, which also facilitated access to the engine and transmission, which were mounted under a classic engine hood and avoided overheating problems."

mikl• 6 years ago

Such an interesting machine.

dayofthedaleks2• 6 years ago

I am highly impressed by the production values as well as the research quality here. Edited in an attic studio, facilitated by Google Translate.

The YouTube auto transcription is brutally bad with Callum’s Scottish accent, though. Do uploaders have the ability to manually edit subtitles?

bserge4• 6 years ago

I still wonder why many people think colonizing Mars is doable, when we can't even colonize Antarctica.

I mean, weather might be slightly better, but the lack of breathable air, water and the distance from Earth far outweigh that.

Neither Mars nor Antarctica offer anything of real use, even asteroid capture and mining seems like a more viable idea.

daveslash• 6 years ago

Not to mention Mars' lack of protective magnetic fields....

Robotbeat5• 6 years ago

It really is not that important. Solve the atmosphere problem, and the surface radiation levels would be plenty low enough. Additionally, even without a magnetic field, it’d take on the order of 100 million years for Mars to lose an atmosphere if it were terraformed. Earth, due to Sun increasing in temperature, may become uninhabitable in about ~250-500 million years without active measures as well.

thecopy• 6 years ago

Neither Mars nor Antarctica offer anything of real use

What about experience and knowledge?

duxup4• 6 years ago

At least as far as colonization goes, I feel like we're getting really close to not needing to colonize a place to learn a great deal.

buran774• 6 years ago

Maybe we'd be better off investing in developing technology that can take the risk of exploring Mars for us, and also benefit from the side effect of being able to use that same tech here at home for any number of things.

But colonizing the Moon or Mars is a competition where the prize is far more than "well, we're here".

bserge4• 6 years ago

Of course that's worth it, but it just takes a few teams and could even be done exclusively with robots.

mLuby2• 6 years ago

There is no strife, no prejudice, no national conflict in outer space as yet. Its hazards are hostile to us all. Its conquest deserves the best of all mankind, and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation may never come again… We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win, and the others, too.

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

capdeck• 6 years ago

Look and compare the military and space budgets of all countries... it doesn't matter really what we do - it will always be better than what we are doing now.

Koshkin3• 6 years ago

weather might be slightly better

On a hot day there will be around 25 degrees Celsius, tops; the following night, minus 100.

Torkel3• 6 years ago

It's about the 'why'. The thing that Mars has to offer that Antarctica does not is "backup solution for humankind". An asteroid impact can make earth uninhabitable. With a self sustaining backup on Mars we can keep humans around even after that. Asteroids are interesting too, but more far fetched than Mars.

I recommend watching the Elon Musk presentations on Mars / making life multiplanetary.

Koshkin3• 6 years ago

An asteroid impact

I wonder whether this is more likely to happen on Mars (due to its relative proximity to the asteroid belt).

bserge4• 6 years ago

Now that you mention it, Antarctica actually does seem like a good backup solution. Not as good as Mars, and not against Earth shattering asteroids, but much easier to set up.

It's pretty far away from everywhere, so it would be a decent shelter for humans and important resources alike.

Though tbf, good underground bases around the world would work pretty well.

The problem with Mars is it would take hundreds of years with current technology to settle and become self-sufficient. If something wipes out Earth in the meantime, Martians would just die a slower death.

And again, bases on asteroids (especially if they're brought into Earth's orbit) seem like a better idea.

DiogenesKynikos2• 6 years ago

Even after the worst imaginable asteroid impact, Earth would still be much more habitable than Mars. Keeping a "backup" on Earth would be far easier than keeping a backup on Mars. At the end of the day, Earth has a thick atmosphere, abundant water, 1g of gravity and topsoil, and Mars lacks all those things.

Shivetya• 6 years ago

well let us not kid ourselves, select humans will be protected and may survive. how many must survive to have survivable off Earth population viable?

baybal2• 6 years ago

Before setting up on Mars, Humankind will surely setup itself in orbital space, and moon first.

xoa• 6 years ago

The thing that Mars has to offer that Antarctica does not is "backup solution for humankind". An asteroid impact can make earth uninhabitable.

I've actually come around to strongly agreeing with the "backup solution for humanity" thing, but I think "asteroid/whatever making earth uninhabitable" is one of the least compelling and direct threats. I now believe the single biggest thing having humanity out amongst the stars would bring is some level of guaranteed diversity and resistance to dystopia. There remains no indication that FTL will ever be possible, and while that's generally treated as an obstacle and bad thing for interstellar humanity, it also has some silver linings. It will always be fundamentally hard for many kinds of potential dystopia to coordinate in a uniform way if comms have a minimum time in the minutes, days, months or years and direct physical travel time ranges from months to years/centuries to "essentially never the energy cost is so high".

If humanity was "out there", yeah it'd provide some redundancy against certain kinds of biosphere ending events. But I think the biggest thing it'd provide redundancy for would be human failures and/or the failures of our creations. Falling into locally optimal controlling regimes that are hard/impossible to escape from internally, runaway technological singularities that go bad (be they information, bioengineered or whatever), etc. A lot of what could happen is very hard or impossible to predict, but the speed of light and rocket equation are both less so. And it's also less likely that the same thing would go wrong simultaneously everywhere, so at least everyone else would be able to observe what had happened. Space level distance also inherently fights the kind of uniformization that we're seeing on Earth, far enough apart there is no way to keep everything sync'd.

gherkinnn• 6 years ago

I feel that us going to Mars is like re-writing an enormous legacy code base, maybe using fancier tools, but still stuck in the same culture as before.

Of course, we’ll build the same mess as before and forget the million special cases we didn’t bother thinking about.

No need to be defeatist though. The prospect of space exploration picking up again is an exciting one. And even if we’re not going anywhere, we’ll learn new stuff along the way.

Other than that, Antarctic or below the sea are other viable options to escape to. And they’re right here.

cmrdporcupine2• 6 years ago

I can't actually imagine what could happen to Earth that would make it worse than Mars.

After an asteroid impact at least there'd likely be breathable air and some water and oceans still around. Most of an atmosphere.

Mars is a radioactive, extremely cold, thin atmosphered dustbowl without breathable air and no life to speak of.

analbumcover4• 6 years ago

They'd be better off reading Zubrin's The Case for Mars since SpaceX is essentially just following the plan he outlined in that book.

phkahler• 6 years ago

I think almost any post-asteroid earth will be more inhabitable than Mars.

I still think it's worth going and trying. IMHO it's more interesting and potentially useful than what's done with a lot of other money.

ceejayoz• 6 years ago

I still wonder why many people think colonizing Mars is doable, when we can't even colonize Antarctica.

I think it's highly likely we could colonize Antarctica on a technological level, but various treaties prevent it.

dekhn2• 6 years ago

We have colonized Antartica- multiple nations overwinter there.

jcranmer• 6 years ago

They are not self-sustaining, and self-sustaining colonies are what is entailed in the justification of colonizing Mars to provide a backup for Earth.

AtlasBarfed• 6 years ago

If only there were some way to modify the axis of rotation of the earth. If we could get antarctica into temperate zones we'd add a major continent for settling.

lm28469• 6 years ago

Because if you believe in it gives you the comfort of not having to care about long term sustainability on earth. It's one of the many facets of the "tech will fix everything" people.

What life do you want to live, the "we're slowly fucking up the only hospitable place humanity will ever step foot on" or the "we'll be sipping UBI financed mojitos with Musk on Mars by 2050" ?

keymone2• 6 years ago

Your argument is severely undermined by the fact that mars is already fucked up and we need to employ lots of tech to fix it. We can then use that tech to solve some of the issues on earth.

contrarianmop• 6 years ago

A planet colonised and dependent solely on high tech for its own survival is a potential catalyst for radical innovation and trade. We could turn it into a place free or our earthly issues. Antarctica is just a cold place which we may colonise once it melts, start a few wars over it maybe, destroy it, exterminate its tiny wildlife and so on. Mars is already dead, hopefully not stimulating enough for our primitive instincts and will let us focus solely on tech advancement.

0ld2• 6 years ago

a wonder what on earth made the guy pronounce kh as ch

0ld2• 6 years ago

i was also completely puzzled what the hell "yearny" (or something) meant until i saw мирный on the map

god, is it that hard to check up at least the approximate pronunciation of things and places when you are making a video like that?

cpursley• 6 years ago

I've been studying Russian for several years. The pronunciation of certain letters and letter combinations can be difficult; give people a break. Or at least correct them in a helpful way.

woobar• 6 years ago

Author commented on this:

"...the worst thing was (and this is my fault) I consulted with someone who taught me how to pronounce it, but then I sort of reverted back to the wrong pronunciation while I recorded and I’m ashamed to say it was 3am and I just didn’t want to record for the 10th time . I figured if people understood that it was an honest mistake and not me being lazy they might forgive me! Next time I’ll be taking much better care!"

zoomablemind2• 6 years ago

Captivating documentary. Thanks to the author. Also thanks for staying consistent with pronunciation too. Surprised it would bother the Russian speakers so much at all. Oh, well, the designers back in Ukrainian SSR would not dare to name it in Ukrainian manner either.

There seems to be some unintended irony in the naming. There was a popular sedan car Moskvitch [1] (masculine for Moscow resident), and Zaporozhets [2] (masc. for resident of Zaporizhia in Russian). Both of these cities had resp. car factories. However, Kharkiv, had none, instead it had a tractor and tank factory... The product is literally out of the league, so is the name Kharkovchanka (fem. for resident of Kharkiv in Russian)

I'd guess the choice of masculine for a car name is in line with masc. for 'automobile' in Russian. Meanwhile, the feminine in this case is, perhaps, for fem. 'machine' in Russian. Just a guess.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moskvitch_402

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZAZ_Zaporozhets

noir_lord3• 6 years ago

If you like this stuff check https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9Mdi_Fh9_Ag they most informative and dryly hilarious historian I know is Drachinifel.

His stuff is beautifully researched and you can tell it's his passion.

I posted that one on HN a while back but it didn't go anywhere.

I've listened to it several times entirely because it reminds me of dysfunctional companies so much.

francis_t_catte• 6 years ago

Hahahah, oh man, one of Drach's best. Highly recommend his episode on what to do if your ship is sinking/exploding/disagreeable too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbX8rJMI9GM

btw, did anyone else see Japanese torpedo boats???

zoomablemind2• 6 years ago

... it reminds me of dysfunctional companies so much.

Thanks for the link. Sad as is a bizarre display of hazards of imperial ambitions. Looking back, Kamchatka's annoyance must be symbolic in this context.

Reading this depiction of dysfunctions of navies of the country on the brink of historical changes, hard not to draw parallels with the recent sad adventures of Russian Federation's only aircraft carrier [1].

In this light, I really appreciated the In-Memoriam at the end of Drachinifel's video to remember the lives of officers and sailors lost in the imperial battles.

[1] https://www.news.com.au/technology/innovation/military/hole-...

throwaway0a5e3• 6 years ago

Maybe I'm crazy but wondering if your engine is gonna overheat, field modifying tracks and swapping a gearbox in the middle of nowhere in -40 weather sounds like a fun time.

amoitnga• 6 years ago

I'm not quite sure why apparently accepted english name for the town is Kharkiv, and author wrongly (understandably) pronounces it as Charkovchanka. Yeah, it's hard - no biggie.

just wanted to let those of you who interested to know how to pronounce it is: first 3 characters are same as in word 'harvest' and rest almost the way author pronounces it - kovchanka, so

har-kov-chanka

only r has to be softer. It just sounds so much better

try russian sound ->

https://translate.google.com/?rlz=1C5CHFA_enUS806US806&um=1&...

Kharkovchanka – Soviet Antarctic Cruisers [video]

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