The soviets were building street lamps and making cookery and razor blades out of titanium… the USSR was the biggest producer of titanium in the world and on th

The soviets were building street lamps and making cookery and razor blades out of titanium… the USSR was the biggest producer of titanium in the world and on the other hand Russian steel metallurgy was quite poor. The US had far better steel and they didn’t had a lot of experience with a Titanium, when the US learned that the Russians were building submarines out of titanium they weren’t surprised because they thought they couldn’t afford it they knew that the USSR had more titanium than what they knew what to do with it but because the US couldn’t figure out how to weld large titanium structures in atmospheric air. Welding titanium is a PITA and the Russians simply had far more experience with it after having the luxury of working with it at scale for decades. As for carriers yes it was a conscious decision because they couldn’t build large enough carriers to have a sufficiently large air wing to cover them at all time and because they knew they can’t compete with the size of a US carrier group. A Russian carrier was designed to operate as a much smaller task force than a US carrier group and so it had to pull its own weight when it came to surface combat. The US on the other hand could afford to build a lot of super carriers and field more than enough ships to support them in battle. If the Soviets could build carriers the size of a US carrier and wield a fleet large enough to support a similarly sized carrier group they would’ve have.