[Calamitous]

> Punishing people for making mistakes means very few will be willing to take responsibility.

That’s what responsibility is: taking lumps for making mistakes.

If I make a mistake on the road and end up killing someone, I can absolutely be held liable for manslaughter.

I don’t know if jail time is the right answer, but there absolutely needs to be some accountability.

[WalterBright]

Have you ever made a mistake on the road that luckily did not result in anyone getting killed?

During WW2, a B-19 crash landed in the Soviet Union. The B-29's technology was light-years ahead of Soviet engineering. Stalin demanded that an exact replica of the B-29 be built. And that's what the engineers did. They were so terrified of Stalin that they carefully duplicated the battle damage on the original.

Be careful what you wish for when advocating criminal punishment.

[int_19h]

Tu-4 was indeed a very close copy of B-29, but no, they did not "carefully duplicate the battle damage" on the original. The one prominent example of copying unnecessary things that is usually showcased in this instance is a mistakenly drilled rivet hole in one of the wings that was carefully reproduced thereafter despite there not being any evident purpose for it.

That said, even then Tu-4 wasn't a carbon copy. Because US used imperial units for everything, Soviets simply couldn't make it a carbon copy because they could not e.g. source plating and wire of the exact right size. So they replaced it with the nearest metric equivalents that were available, erring on the side of making things thicker, to ensure structural integrity - which also made it a little bit heavier than the original. Even bigger changes were made - for example, Tupolev insisted on using existing Soviet engines (!), weapons, and radios in lieu of copying the American ones. It should be noted that Stalin really did want a carbon copy originally, and Tupolev had to fight his way on each one of those decisions.