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K340A: The Brain Computer of Chernobyl Duga Radar [video]
- OedipusRex 2y agoThis sounds like something you'd run across in the Zone.
- a-dub 2y agofancy a picnic?
- barber_the_dope 2y ago[dead]
- paradox460 2y agoThe brain scorcher
- zikduruqe 2y agoThat's the Russian Woodpecker. It would wreak havoc on the HF bands.
- Animats 2y agoThat's a strange machine. It's too bad so little is known about how it attached to the rest of the radar system. It's clearly a special purpose machine, one with manually programmed ROMs, built to do a very specific task. But what? Did it beam-steer the radar? Process the returns? The special-purpose I/O gear that must have been present is gone. The console is clearly just a programming and debug console, not something for seeing what the radar was seeing. The US's main over the horizon radar of that era was Cobra Mist.[1] It never really worked well. Too much interference, supposedly. Trying to bounce radar off the ionosphere is inherently iffy. The US instead deployed line of sight radar chains, such as BMEWS. This required sites strung across northern Canada, but worked. More modern over the horizon radars do work, but have much more compute power behind them. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_Mist https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_Mist
- sixthDot 2y ago> So little is known That's also why there's even a conspiracy theory about the Duga. It obviously hasn't been proved but the idea is that the Chernobyl reactor accident would be a U.S sabotage targeting the Duga.
- kurthr 2y agoWith the goal of spreading radioactive fallout over Poland, Germany, France, and Italy? https://realchernobyl.com/en/map-of-pollution https://realchernobyl.com/en/map-of-pollution I mean, it's not like the worlds most diabolical intelligence service would have access to a weather report. Unless, the real was to elect Greens in those countries so that they would decommission nuclear power and need to build a natural gas pipeline from Russia! What better way to serve the long term foreign policy goals?
- sixthDot 2y agoyeah that looks stupid. I just said that this theory exists. It's related to the fact that "we dont know what the Luga was for". As often, when people dont know exactly, they imagine things. That's all. I'm amused ;)
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- H8crilA 2y agoChernobyl blew up because of intense operator stupidity. Also it did not stop producing power, the last reactor was used till 2000.
- sixthDot 2y agoI know. Everybody knows. There was a test. During this test they managed to highlight a serious design flaw ;) It's clear, it's documented. What I say is that eventually a marginal frame of people dont believe that fact and instead prefer to believe something wrong ;) For instance: "chernobyl accident was meant to impeach the Duga to ever work".
- mzs 2y agophotos: https://www.arcanumurbex.de/photos/military-objects/duga-1-radar-station/ https://www.arcanumurbex.de/photos/military-objects/duga-1-r...
- petertodd 2y agoYou used to be able to easily visit the Duga Radar, legally, via one of the many tour companies that offered Chernobyl tours. Back in 2018 I visited myself, I believe with this company, as part of a conference: https://chernobyl-tour.com/tours_to_the_chernobyl-2_duga-1_en.html https://chernobyl-tour.com/tours_to_the_chernobyl-2_duga-1_e... At least then Chernobyl had been turned into quite the tourist destination with enough tours running that there even was a giftshop at the main checkpoint. Unfortunately due to the proximity to the Russian/Belarus borders the whole area is closed right now due to Russia's invasion (Russia even occupied Chernobyl briefly). But it'll probably reopen sooner or later.
- jareklupinski 2y ago> At least then Chernobyl had been turned into quite the tourist destination with enough tours running that there even was a giftshop at the main checkpoint. I still remember the dinner they serve at the end, where they present food made using "locally grown crops" (grown in clean soil) Best bread I've ever had.
- petertodd 2y agoDunno if we ate at the same place. But at the end of my tour they also served us dinner, and it was excellent. One of the first times I had borsch.
- chiph 2y agoThe Russian soldiers occupying Chernobyl apparently ignored the warnings and dug trenches in the contaminated soil. And unsurprisingly came down with radiation sickness.
- cedric_h 2y agosource?
- cedric_h 2y agoah. https://www.newsweek.com/russian-soldiers-struck-radiation-sickness-after-digging-chernobyl-1797649 https://www.newsweek.com/russian-soldiers-struck-radiation-s... https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/red-forest-chernobyl-radiation-sickness-b2330067.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/red-forest-c... https://www.kyivpost.com/post/31734 https://www.kyivpost.com/post/31734
- grishka 2y agoOh, I visited it in 2015. There were some very odd-looking huge boards with pins inserted into them that I assumed were ROMs. Also panels that were clearly intended to display some part of the state of the CPU. Here's some pictures I took: https://sun9-70.userapi.com/impf/c621621/v621621231/20f0d/vLVISoaL8Ww.jpg?size=2560x1920&quality=96&sign=ac41e1c73e1a07b089e6b9224ea22d7d&type=album https://sun9-70.userapi.com/impf/c621621/v621621231/20f0d/vL... https://sun9-67.userapi.com/impf/c621621/v621621231/20f5d/i8AgeUZgmRA.jpg?size=2560x1920&quality=96&sign=1c891e470434d7bf157d9d4f2d31b515&type=album https://sun9-67.userapi.com/impf/c621621/v621621231/20f5d/i8... https://sun9-28.userapi.com/impf/c621621/v621621231/20f53/cfltU5WRhYs.jpg?size=2560x1920&quality=96&sign=a8ceccd03503ecaf813930043b3aa9f5&type=album https://sun9-28.userapi.com/impf/c621621/v621621231/20f53/cf... edit: these ROM "cassettes" appear in the video at around 12:40
- ngcc_hk 2y agoAmazing. What is OS?
- leoh 2y agoAlmost certainly there wasn't an OS, but algorithms (the word "software" probably isn't appropriate here) that did numerical calculations to attempt to detect (in theory) patterns of ionospheric disturbances that would (again, in theory) correlate with an ICBM.
- xattt 2y agoAs a child of the Eastern bloc, I appreciate the attention that Soviet tech is getting from this YouTuber. As Slavic language speaker, however, I find his videos unwatchable because of the unsettling breathy marble-mouth narration and deer-in-the-headlights talking head cutaways. I am conflicted.
- leoh 2y agoAlthough Duga was an impressive infrastructure project, I don't really think there is anything beyond theory suggesting it could have detected ICBMs (or done much of anything else for that matter); and although the computational technology is interesting and exotic, it was almost certainly lightyears behind computers in the west. Cray-1 was already in production at Los Alamos in the 1970s. This was a culture that said Chernobyl's reactor design was safe. Far less avarice would be required to suggest that a giant lattice of metal with exotic computers inside of it could actually do something useful.
- thewanderer1983 2y agoAnother one worth mentioning is the Fialka. It was a cipher machine used all the way up to the 90's. It was only a little better than the Enigma and lagged far behind what the western world was using. Not sure why they bothered to try to destroy most of them. It's interesting from the technology perspective just how far behind the soviets were in some areas. Fast forward to today and China isn't in the same boat. A lot of their technology is on par and there are even areas where they surpass the west.
- pgospodinov 2y agoThis comment seemed overly dismissive, so I took 20 minutes to read on Over-the-Horizon Radar systems. They do work and a lot of countries have developed and operated suck systems including the USA, the UK, Canada, France and China. The prototype Duga radar was able to detect Soviet launches from Kazakhstan and the Pacific. The Soviet Union also maintained a number of other such systems and Russia still develops and uses similar types of radars.
- TrackerFF 2y agoThose old Soviet over-the-horizon radars would cause interference here in the west, especially close to the borders where I lived. Sounded like a chopper. Other interference memories is Soviet TV suddenly fading in and out on your screen.
- madaxe_again 2y agoYes. That’s why Duga was known as the Russian Woodpecker, as it would put out a series of pulses on UHF bands that would (apparently, to someone who had never heard a woodpecker) sound like a woodpecker. This is probably what you were hearing, as it sounds more like a chopper than a woodpecker to me, too. https://youtu.be/aOMVdOc9UbE?si=VuNjeoCMvherWwql https://youtu.be/aOMVdOc9UbE?si=VuNjeoCMvherWwql
- NikkiA 2y agoI grew up relatively near 'RAF' Fylingdales and the signal from the US BMEWS was so strong that it would interfere with listening to tapes because the tape heads would pick up the magnetic flux 'thrum.... thrum' of the radar sweeps, whenever you got within about 2km of it.
- rootbear 2y agoI don’t speak Russian or any other language written in Cyrillic, but I learned the alphabet years ago for reasons. It has come in handy when looking at pictures of computers and other tech, where many of the words are cognates with English. Words like “register” and “control” are clear in some of the pictures linked to here.
- Scoundreller 2y agoI’ve also learned how to read a language’s phonetic alphabet. Always funny when someone asks “hey, can you read this $language”, then I read it out aloud to them. Then they ask what it means and I’m like “oh, I have absolutely no idea, I just know how to read it”