Question is, is the value of all the western owned factories and assets in China going to cover the cost of all Chinese investment in the US?
Highly doubtful. And unless you want US "investment" of the kind that is asset price bubbles in education or health or financial services. I do not think you could get US "investment" on the necessary volume into China anyway. Perhaps China should just get those broken Boeing 737MAX and 787 the US has sitting on vehicle parking lots on massive bulk discount. At least they would be useful for something. It is a shame China can't buy GE now that it the company is in the dumps. The French did manage to claw their Arabelle nuclear steam turbine facilities back from GE though. Civilian aviation related companies in general and tourism are distressed right now.
The Slava class emerged originally in the same era as the first Ticos yes, however, they were also a reflection of Soviet shipbuilding and subsystems of the time (and far less capable and technologically sophisticated than contemporary US equivalents)... and the Slavas that the RuN continue to run today have not received anywhere near the same extent of upgrades that remaining USN Ticos have enjoyed.
You can have the most kinematically impressive large missiles and the most impressive CIWS guns as you want, on a large formidable 10k+ ton hull.... but if your radars, and sensors are unable to discriminate the target and observe a multi-axis battlespace environment and to guide and cue your missiles, and if your missiles themselves are obsolescent, and if your combat management system is too old and to slow to observe and react, then all of your weapons mean nothing because you've already been defeated in the electromagnetic spectrum.
Designing a CMS for Slava was possible - it just wasn't done. Partially because her class was a cheaper substitute to the Kirov class, and CMS was anything but cheap.
About chips - application matters. On a plane, 1980s Soviet radar weighed several times as much as a comparable American one, and still worked both worse and less reliably because of constrained design.
On ships - provided conceptual design was of similar vintage, worse chips mostly mean just a few more tons of electronics, maybe more need to pay attention to code optimization. Unlucky, but still acceptable for a ship that weighs 12000 tons.
I agree with what you guys are saying. In general. But the thing is. The Soviet industry, in particular, did have more advanced radar tech than that. The MiG-31 had a PESA radar and came out in 1982. It is harder to make a compact radar for an aircraft than something you can put on a cruiser. The Soviet Daryal AESA ground based early-warning radar was first operational in 1977.
The first Ticos also had a similar issue in that they had the twin-arm missile launchers and not the VLS. The VLS came out in 1984. So was this worse with its revolver launchers and side mounts? Not really.
The Slava classes were huge because they were supposed to be multi-role but the weapons themselves were not miniaturized enough to make them smaller. And just consider the much older Alfa class submarines they had way higher amounts of crew automation than anything the US had. Then you have to consider it seems to have been, like you said, a massive cost cutting exercise and they reused as much existing technology as they could in these ships. It simply was not as much of a priority for their MIC. The Soviet Union was a mostly autharchic continental empire, it did not need to focus on the navy necessary to sustain a huge mercantile empire.
And even the Soviets did have ICs in the early 1980s. At worst they might have been like 5 years behind in ICs. Most often like 3 years.
The problem was they never produced these things in quantity and there was lack of cross use of technology across different projects and bureaus to a large degree.
And while the latest upgrades to the Slava are modest. You can't say they make no difference. I mean just look at this.
Marshal Ustinov
Moskva
As you can see the main radars are totally different. And I doubt the command and control were not upgraded to some degree. Since the upgrades are contemporary with the Admiral Grigorovich. The Marshal Ustinov came out of modernization in 2018.
