If you ever compared the complexity of early Russian nuclear subs to early American nuclear subs you’ll see that while the Russians did make vastly simpler machines, they also did not have the redundancy that American subs had.

They worked, and worked simply, but that was about it. If you look at the evolution of automotive industry as late as three decades or so ago, you’ll see the opposite trend. Imports tended to rely heavily on technology, while domestic US vehicles relied simple mechanics and greater displacement to develop power.

However the imports tended to be much more reliable, despite their added complexity. Of course nowadays this is no longer the case, as over the last two decades, displacement has taken a back seat to technological advancement, but there are many examples where simpler is not necessarily better.

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‘There is a well-known anecdote about the effort that NASA put into solving the problem of writing in weightlessness, where ink does not flow spontaneously toward the tip of a pen. NASA’s approach, it is claimed, was to spend millions of dollars to invent a pressurized pen. The proverbially simple-and-straightforward approach of the Russian space program was to use pencils.

The anecdote is amusing and certainly points out authentic differences in the technical mindset of the two space administrations, but is not true. Both Russian cosmonauts and American astronauts used pencils. The pressurized space pen was invented by Paul Fisher, who paid for its development from his own pocket and gave it to NASA for $2.95. The pen was also used by Russian cosmonauts.’

www.attivissimo.net/antibufala/biro_spaziale/biro_spaziale.htm

www.snopes.com/business/genius/spacepen.asp

one thing the USA will never live down, is that they spent $$$ making a pen that would work in space, and the russians just took pencils, cheaper and does a comparable job

Then the Soviet program ran out of money and a hangar collapsed on it in 2002.