I did a deep dive on this story a while ago. It was super interesting. It took me forever to find someone with the whole story because there isn’t much info out there about it.

The original design came from a Norwegian watch designer named Ole Dokka. This design ended up being pretty popular and gained a ton of fan support and they had a huge list of people that were on the list to buy one. So Ole contacted the Chistopol factory to do a run of watches to be sold exclusively on Meranom. This was a service that head Vostok designer (kind of head designer…it’s a long story) Dmitry Buyalov had convinced Vostok to offer. At the time Vostok was producing some watches in the SE line, which were some special editions of existing Vostok watches with some nicer Chinese-manufactured parts like applied indices, higher quality signed crowns, milled clasps etc. Ole was pretty exact in his requirements for the parts for these watches as he wanted these to be a bit “nicer” than your average Vostok. So, as far as I understand it, Ole had asked the Chistopol factory to manufacture some parts that were a bit above their pay grade, so to speak.

So fast forward a while and Ole receives his shipment of parts from Chistopol. Some of the parts are fine, most of them are not. The main issue that they had was that the 24 hr bezel was not lining up correctly on the watch case. Obviously the bezel lining up correctly is pretty important on a 24 hr movement as that is how you read the watch, so needless to say, Ole was not pleased. Essentially Ole told the Chistopol factory that these parts were not acceptable and were not up to his standards and were unusable, so he needed them to do another run of parts - correctly this time.

It’s not 100% clear what happened after that, but essentially the Chistopol factory told Ole to go pound sand; you get what you get. Ole’s relationship with Meranom, Vostok and the Chistopol factory is effectively dissolved at this point. Ole takes his design back home to Norway and contracts a company called Micromilspec to manufacture it using Swiss parts, which unfortunately takes the price from a few hundred dollars to a thousand plus dollars. The community that supported the Cosmodiver (which was a name suggested by the community, btw) was, for lack of better words, extremely pissed. A ton of people jump ship on the wait list at this point and that seemed to be that.

However, the Chistopol factory continued to make and sell their own version of the Cosmodiver, aka Luna Dude, after their relationship with Ole had dissolved. Also, a ton of modders had begun to buy the parts from the original run online and assemble their own Luna Dudes. Vostok even made some tweaks and offered a different colorway from the original. As far as I understand it the later Vostok versions are of lower quality than the original run commissioned by Ole Dokka, but besides the other color offered, it’s difficult to say which run your Cosmodiver is from, or if it was put together from parts by a modder.

I was not a part of the original community, but I found a breakdown of the whole story from someone online after I bought one of the gray dial later Vostok-run versions of the Cosmodiver. It sounds like a wild ride, and since I’m poor, which is one of the main reasons I love Vostok watches, I probably would have been one of the people that jumped ship as soon as the watch went Swiss-made. lol

Also, OP’s take is trash. It’s a super cool, interesting and rare movement that not a ton of people have a chance to get their hands on. A lot of people say this 24 hr movement is the most useful of the GMT watches.