CuriousMarc casually makes a crack in one of his recent videos about Communism and the Soviet/Russian space program flying a mechanical computer until 2002 ("why use capitalist microchips when proletarian gears will do?"1) and it got me curious: how did the US space program solve this?
the answer appears to be mostly "it didn't". I'd internalized enough Apollo-related media as a kid to know that NASA didn't fly one of these on Apollo (why would you? Apollo only spent a couple hours in Earth orbit anyway); upon checking the somewhat surprising dearth of information about the Gemini cockpit, it appears not to have flown one either -- that ball-shaped instrument is a traditional artificial horizon, like in aircraft.
in fact, a similar instrument only appears to have flown on Mercury, and only sporadically -- NASA called it the Earth Path Indicator -- and it solved the problem the same way: proletarian gears.
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apart from the obvious anachronism of ascribing the engineering decisions of post-soviet russia to communism