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Conflict Noted
I have not edited the article, because I don't know where the truth lies, but the following sentences seem to be in conflict.
"continuously growing since World War II" "over the last seventy-five years most cargo cults have petered out."
It is probably technically possible for them both to be true depending on what exactly they are claiming to measure, but it looks like different people passing their own guesses off as fact to me.
The Tupolev Tu-4
There were three planes that had to land in Russia. Two were used to discover their performance characteristics and one was completely dismantled for reverse engineering to build duplicates.
That one happened to have a patch from repair of earlier battle damage. Only the first Tu-4 had that repair duplicated. Russian aeronautical engineers weren't _that_ dumb. There were some differences between the B29 and Tu-4, most notably in the thickness of the outer skin. The B29's skin was all the same thickness. Due to aluminum being in shorter supply in Russia, the skin on the Tu-4 varied in thickness, only matching the B29 where it was riveted to structural members. It was thinner between the structural supports.
As for why the repaired damage was duplicated on the first Tu-4, I've heard that a likely reason was the men doing the project feared that any visible discrepancy could mean at best the loss of their jobs or at worst their lives. I also heard somewhere that it could've been a bit of a joke, to see if the project's government inspectors would notice what should obviously be seen as a patch.
Would people _please_ leave this section deleted in the article? It is one of the most implausible theories I've seen on wiki, with absolutely no evidence cited or implied.—The preceding unsigned comment was added by 34.173.92.238 (talk • contribs) .