The Technical Censors

Russia's modernization got off to a rocky start.

To his credit, Evgeny the Old did establish the polytechnic schools, and provided a fair number of subsidies to make them accessible. The first generation of Russian technicians, however, were mostly hired by the first generation of Russian industrialists who would happily cut off their nose to spite their competitor's face; a fair number of those engineers were paid well to make things not interoperable, in fact, and that set a precedent for things to come.

By the turn of the century, Russia had two dominant gauges, neither of which could run on the other; there were two others that didn't cover nearly enough area to compete with the first two, but enough to be nontrivial. (Significantly, the area around Lake Baikal involved a track change. From the very beginning it was a logistical loggerhead; when the Russo-Japanese War began and armies had to be mobilized to Meammosirsk, the delays were serious enough that it may have cost Russia the war.) Tsarist power grids were even worse; east of Moscow, some cities had dangerously different voltage standards, and even today older electricians still have complete sets of adapters.

What were they to do?

While the Vechist Wars were still underway, and all the manifold problems of Russia's infrastructure were coming to light, the Provisional Government established the All-Russian People's Mechanical and Electrical Standardization Commission (Всероссийская народная механической и электрической стандартизации комиссии, something or other, but the acronym is likely and tentatively VNMESK) to answer a pessimistic question: "Is it even possible to rationalize the standardization problem?"

Commissioner Vassilev's report, published two months later, answered with a confident "Yes," promising an overview of how such a miracle might be achieved. It was the only apolitical thing MESK has ever done.

The Census of Technical Design

As soon as they got around to writing that overview, though, MESK started running into problems. Some of the problems were straightforward to answer but not to address (like which rail gauges to abandon), and others were complicated by things outside MESK's control. MESK's overarching issue was the fact that it was expected to do several unrelated, and often conflicting, missions at once:

• "Rationalization." Great Russia's problem was that there were very few meaningful standards. The task of MESK was to resolve this, and the original goal was to cut down as many alternate standards as was feasible - ideally all of them.
• Artisanality. Vechism has always had a romantic streak, and it did romanticize the yeoman craftsman. This will be discussed at some point in the future, when I spell out Vechism - what matters is that, for purely ideological reasons, MESK was expected to rationalize Russia in a way that didn't give it over to dark Satanic mills. (What this had to do with track gauges was unclear, but it was an issue that came up more than Vassilev and company would've preferred.)
• No consequences. When MESK was getting started, Great Russia was at war, on multiple fronts. The simple forced phaseout of things was impossible at the time, because it would've interfered with one or another war effort - and the fronts themselves didn't like a panel of REMFs ordering them to start phasing out the hardware that, after all, they had perfectly good reasons for using.

It was too much to ask, and in the end MESK came up with a four-point proposal to deal with the issue.

• Particularly obsolete or labor-intensive hardware (steam engines on some railroads, for instance) would be phased out immediately, with replacements also to begin immediately. The resources saved from operating and maintaining them could be used to modernize their infrastructure as well.
• Specific high-priority issues of civil engineering (the rail crossovers at Lake Baikal, for instance) would also be dealt immediately as possible. (This wording was chosen deliberately, to avoid committing to them in any particular order.)
• Domestic support for low-priority civil engineering would be ended within a year, with emphasis on total phaseout by the end of the next Repartition. (MESK's opinion was that there were enough random technicians to cover the problems that would result, and the end of domestic support would incentivize bottom-up standardization.)
• MESK would publish a regular periodical, providing a neutral forum in which experts on relevant fields could discuss their problems, voice their concerns, propose solutions and better coordinate their efforts, both with MESK and each other.

In late 1916, that journal entered circulation as the Monthly Census of Technical Design. (It was later reduced to quarterly publication after the civil engineering problems were dealt with.) The world would never be the same.

Popular Knowledge and What Do We Know?

The first problem that MESK ran into was with the abrupt phaseout of obsolete stuff. Getting stuff phased out was usually easy; getting stuff replaced was usually much less so, because the information necessary to replace it right simply wasn't there, and Russia didn't have a communication infrastructure that could cover for it. Early in 1917, their solution was to make a fateful alliance with Narofraz ("the People's Office for Development and Invention," aka. the Vechist patent office), which began publishing a journal of official blueprints and schematics for broad circulation: Popular Knowledge. (A back-page column of Popular Knowledge, entitled "What Do We Know?", allowed people to write in, reporting problems with PK's blueprints and their repairs.)

Before they'd even finished rationalizing the electric grids, though, the Vechist Wars had ended, freeing up Great Russia to make things really complicated. Because in addition to their domestic standards, and the designs available to Narofraz, they had all of the machinery they'd looted during the Thousand Days as well, which gave them a lot of options - more than enough to argue about. (It also didn't help that with the end of the Vechist Wars, the Russian military was finally able to sit down and standardize its own equipment - the less classified parts of which, of course, were immediately discussed in PK.)

• Backwards-compatibility: Solutions requiring fewer original parts are to be preferred.
• Modularity: Solutions that are easy to modify are favored. (While it's not official, they do select for these things, simply because it allows them to theoretically invent, develop, and produce more things, that more people can operate and maintain, without any layouts for factory setup.)
• And, in practice, Nepotism: designs built by people who've built previous designs are also prefered. (Which is easy, because after all it encourages designing things to be easy to modify. Once an inventor gets something into official state production, odds are they're going to stay in until they lose an office struggle and leave with a number of medals.)

For both Tsarist and Vechist engineers alike, the occult, meddling complex of MESK, Narofraz, and the military proving grounds - all mediated through the Census of Technical Design - became known and hated by a single short name: "the Technical Censors."

The impact of the Technical Censors

As of 1930, the Technical Censor system is still standing, and while it will be broken one day (nothing lasts forever), it's going to significantly skew the evolution of world technology before that day comes. Off the top of my head, some of those impacts are as follows:

• The emphasis on using preexisting parts is starting to have serious impacts on vehicle engineering, especially for military vehicles (which are still in their early days as of 1930.) In a lot of ways it is inefficient, but it encourages Russian design teams to think bigger.
• Armored vehicles basically didn't exist until the Thousand Days; I'm not sure if tanks, by our definition, exist at all yet. Be that as it may, the Thousand Days definitely introduced armored warfare as we know it; and, for "ease of production," I totally expect that the next generation of Vechist tanks will be four-track designs, like so. (Why? Because that way you don't need to set up a new track design specifically for the tank itself  Also, and more importantly, because Rule of Cool.)
• Twin-engine aircraft design is going to happen, for the very simple reason that it's going to happen for good reasons anyways. Great Russia's going to see more of them, simply because it lets them keep their older engines in production longer; and, when it becomes clear that said older engines aren't quite as competitive, some design team is going to discover the advantages of push-pull configuration.
• The Technical Censors are also disenfranchising a lot of young brilliant technical minds, whose wonderful ideas are simply too progressive for the Technical Censors to implement. Already, a number of those (especially in western Russia, who were more likely to personally run afoul of backroom infighting) have left Great Russia behind to pursue their calling elsewhere, turning Russian into the language of mad science. Pretty much anything cool can be justified as "Ivan did it."
• Most notably, the Technical Censors are big fans of the diesel engine. They, simply by having the purchasing power of Russia behind them, are going to be what skews all of Andalusada to a more diesel-friendly place.

Is it implausible? Maybe. But as stated above, it's Cool; and these kinds of big, systemic differences are the sorts of things that can alter global technological trends.

If anybody doubts that, consider that Andalusada's present day is in the year 1930. At that point, IRL Russia also had ideology meddling with its science - and Great Russia's ideological meddling, unlike the USSR's, might actually yield some practical results.