This is a spectacular and definitive link. Once again, thanks.

A few comments

First off, it is interesting to note that Venus played much the same role in Soviet science fiction as Mars did in western science fiction. This goes a long way towards explaining the Soviet allocation of resources.

Second, while the technical discussion is excellent, little mention is given to the political processes that allocated the resources. For that metter, little mention is given to total cost, or to the development of dual use technologies. That is perfectly okay given the technical excellence of the study and its image processing - those other studies are for others to do.

It is nice to see that some of the original data streams, which were originally gatherered at such great cost, were still preserved and thus available for modern computer processing. This data is still timely and valuable. While even more of the data could have been made available years ago (1993) for use by the world's planetary science community, it is good to see at least some of it it finally come out, and this author's processing of it is simply excellent.

One gripe that I have is the fish eye graphics used on Venus. No one has rotated these images and cropped them so that the sky appears at the top and the nearby parts at the bottom. Stretching them appropriately would be nice as well. This is how we humans usually look at things, ground to sky.

There seems to have been a systematic problem with Soviet planetary probes, and its not just the funky economic system, but rather something to do with their fault reporting/ fault analysis system, but I just can't put my finger on it.