I just realised there’s room in the world for one more Wes Anderson movie, but only if the story is based in and around these Kharkovchankas.
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More current arctic stuff:
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Now I know exactly what I want for getting out of the campsite at the next wet Glastonbury Festival!
Not to mention the one where Americans decided that it was all a hoax and the British PM turned out to be an Alien in (bad) disguise. And then SID just blasted the entire planet out of disgust,
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This is covered in the comments on this same OP’s documentary on the Snow Cruiser. To get the information, you have to sift through a whole lot of armchair engineers saying “how stupid” the best engineers of the period must have been. A better reaction would be, “I wonder why they did that. They must have had good reasons and I would like to find out”.
There were a lot of reasons for that tire design. Low pressure slick tires were known to work well in sand and on ice. The tires were at the absolute limit of the size that could be produced, and tread was difficult or impossible to mold at that size in any case. They didn’t go with tracks because they wanted individual load control and reduced weight. The list goes on, but the point is to never assume other people are stupid just because of one thing you think you know about a situation. I’m using “you” in the general sense there- not trying to call you out specifically. 
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“Known to work well”? I’m not sure I understand what that means, as they clearly didn’t work well in that application, and as I mentioned, I’ve personally seen larger tires fail to get traction on ice where smaller tires did well. Is this an example of something being “known” but not actually known?
I totally understand that they were pushing the limits of tire manufacturing technology when they made this thing and that molding in fancy tread profiles would have been difficult, but this was in the 1930’s, so snow chains on pneumatic tires (even pretty large ones in industrial applications) had already been in common use for decades.
All that being said, I never said that anyone was “stupid” for designing tires that, in retrospect at least, clearly didn’t provide sufficient traction. I said it was “odd,” and I stand by that statement as the slick tire design was so counter-intuitive. I do admit that it’s possible that there’s some good reason why something like snow chains wouldn’t have helped, though.
Please reread my post and don’t shoot the messenger. I specifically said I was not calling you out personally. I also said they had done their research on tire technology at the time and sand was an environment they tested. Go read the comment thread I suggested if you want to know the details. You seem to be doubling down on believing you know more than other people who’s job was to do the best they could with the information and resources they had. 
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I’m impressed by how fast it can move.
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That’s the thing. I absolutely DO know more in one very important respect. I KNOW that it was a failure in doing what it was meant to do. That doesn’t mean I think I’m “smarter” that the experts at the time, and I certainly never claimed that, given the knowledge and research available to those experts I would definitely have come up with better design. The main thing I was “doubling down” on was that the slick tire design seems counter-intuitive and “odd” to me. Sometimes counterintuitive designs do work brilliantly. In this case it clearly didn’t, whatever the theories behind it may have been.
Look, I think a lot of early attempts at powered aircraft also seem counterintuitive and odd to me, given the advantage of having seen how successful aircraft have evolved. That doesn’t mean I think the designers of those failed attempts were stupid or didn’t have decent theories as to why their inventions should work.
You don’t see an aggressive tread on those tires, because doing so simply makes the tire pick up snow, rapidly turning into an ice donut (snownut?) with ZERO tread presented to the driving surface. Try taking a BMX bicycle out in the snow, sometime, and you’ll see the exact problem.
A couple of additional reasons:
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The spaces between lugs on aggressive treads are very thin and easy to puncture.
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Spikes are an alternative but a) still pick up snow, b) wear quickly, and c) destroy paved roads.
You are making assumptions you cannot support ^^’.
What assumptions do you think I’m making here? I’m stating what I believe to be a plain fact: that smooth tires on ice are counterintuitive, and that they did in fact fail in this application, regardless of what theories may have supported that design choice. And if you’re saying that aggressive treads couldn’t work in this application without getting encrusted in ice, you’re just plain mistaken on that point. The right tread design can absolutely do the job:
Granted, molding that type of tread may have been beyond the technology of the day, but that’s why I was wondering why snow chains seem not to have been attempted. Maybe there’s a great reason why snow chains wouldn’t help, but I’m curious to know what that would be.
As an aside, I may not have a background in arctic vehicles but I’m an engineer who has worked on testing of wheel treads and friction coefficients under various conditions, so I’m not speaking entirely out of my derrière. But I feel like we’re maybe derailing the comment thread a bit so I’m going to drop it.
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