[somat]

I wonder if the designers of cold war soviet planes read the same color theory because their cockpits are always a very particular indescribable shade of green. There were also very specific colors for subsystems, yellow for fuel, purple for hydraulics etc. Much more than the contemporary US designs.

[Loughla]

My father was a mechanic and crew chief working on F-14's during his time in the air force. His two takeaways from his service were: 1. No one should ever join the military for any reason ever forever, and 2. Somebody needs to color code literally anything.

He talked about how the wiring schematics were a maze, made worse by using only non-labeled gray and black wires with connections and mounts that were the same color made of the same material.

The exterior being gray makes sense - harder to see with human eyes. But internals? They should be massively contrasting colors for every single series of pieces to be removed so you can just follow along by color.

[saltcured]

Tangentially, this reminds me of stories from my dad who got some kind of special award for having made their ship radar the best in the fleet.

Sometime before that, he got a lot of flak for having neglected one of the standing rules, to label everything as you take it apart and put it back "the way you found it". He decided to break it down and put it back the way the technical documentation said it should actually go. This seems to be part of the reason his radar performed better than the others after teardown maintenance.

[bityard]

I worked on military avionics in a previous life and all of the planes I worked on had miles of white wires. The reasons given to us were:

1. Cost savings when buying.

2. There are hundreds to thousands of wires in an aircraft, but there are NOT hundreds to thousands of different colors of wires (even if we allow for stripes, etc) that are readily distinguishable to an overworked airman hunched over in a dim, cramped avionics bay trying to fix a plane that needs to take off for a mission in an hour.

If you are lucky, the wires are numbered. But even if they are, you typically identify a wire by its connector pin and PRAY that the fault isn't a break somewhere back in the wiring harness.

[xethos]

I'd also mention that black lasermarked white wire has marvelous contrast, even in the dim, covered in dust. Black lasermarked (or god help you, heatstamped) wire on damn near any other colour, like one finds in automotive, is distinctly worse.

Yellow would be manageable, but the wrong shade of red, purple, green, or blue (wihch, when seperating systems by colour, would inevitably get used) would be shitty to work on

[SoftTalker]

Cheaper to buy huge spools of gray clad wiring than a lot of different color coded wires? Also you don't have to stock a lot of different colors for repairs.

[NetMageSCW]

Unfortunately when you get enough conductors you start running out of insulator colors and start running into the problems copper telephone lines had - using pairs of colors (base with stripe) and tracing get pretty hard at that point.

[eggsome]

Surely you mean F-15 right? (F-14 was exclusive to the Navy + Iran exports)

[Loughla]

Womp womp. Yes. F15. Somewhere my father is screaming.

[zczc]

They definitely knew, Soviet books on industrial design and architecture explicitly mention Birren [1]

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q="биррен"+зеленый&udm=36&tbs=... (search for Russian for "Birren"+green in 20th century books)

[dlcarrier]

I've noticed that both American and Soviet planes used greenish colors, but the American ones are a yellowish green, while the Soviet ones are a bluish green. I've always wondered if the American yellowish green was chosen because it's similar to the color of the zinc chromate primer used on those aircraft, so the transparency of the paint wouldn't be an issue.

[jschveibinz]

The yellowish-green is the zinc chromate "passivation" coating to help prevent corrosion.

[torginus]

That color shows up a lot in stairways apartment blocks and school corridors and bathrooms in ex-Soviet bloc countries.

My two guesses are that it was colored like that get the pilots feel like they were in a particular environment - a familar but not exactly private or comfortable one. It's a cultural thing like if you paint a bus yellow, Americans will think of a school bus, but most other people won't.

My other guess is that they only made certain kinds of dye, and its very well possible the same factory made it that made it for bathroom tiles. In capitalism, if you don't have orange paint, for example, some company will just start making it if there's a demand.

In communism, if nobody makes it, then it's not available, until and if some comittee decides that it should be made.

[gukov]

The reason for the green stairways was the vast surplus of the green paint (used for military equipment) post-WW2.