From the Department of Space Exploration
The Soviet space program used completely different controls and instruments from American spacecraft. One of the coolest of these instruments is the GLOBUS. This showed the cosmonauts their spacecrafts location above earth and it used some astonishingly sophisticated engineering do its job.
You see this isn't a digital computer here, "this navigation instrument was an electromechanical analog computer that used an elaborate system of gears, cams, and differentials to compute the spacecraft's position."
Wow.
this stuff just fires up my imagination. Who says digital computers are the way of the future? I imagine this thing is solar flare proof, doesn't lose information if the power goes out, and just looks sturdy as heck. Makes me rethink what kind of tech I want to use in my sci-fi comics.
More photos and information here: LINK
(Kind of cool: Scroll to the bottom to see a comment by "Unknown" who says he has a working Globus in his collection with a link to a photo. Followed the link to find out it's Steve Jurvetson's Flickr account. Jurvetson is on the board of Spacex and is a huge space nut.)
-Jake