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Comment by ardy42 | Hacker News Reader

> Copies of 50/60's engines from France and Russia?

You have to start somewhere.

I mean, it's not like new software developers start off writing state of the art programs. They write a hello world program like everyone else, and build up from there. Same thing with spinning up industrial capacity in a new area.

Also, IIRC, a lot of the tricky high tech in jet engine production isn't so much in the engines themselves, but in the manufacturing process of the components and materials. That means reverse engineering will only get you so far.

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Yeah exactly metallurgy is really hard. There's not really a software equivalence except maybe some magic algorithm could possibly fit but it's a stretch.

As a seemingly simple example it was only a few years ago that china got good enough at metals to make good pen tips: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/01/18...

Edit: metallurgy

>a few years ago that china got good enough at metals to make good pen tips:

IMO this anecdote has been severely misinterpreted by western media. The narrative seems to be lol China only learned to make ball point pen recently, when really it was Premier LiKeQiang politicized importance of precision manufacturing for national security, and 2 years later Chinese industry developed tungsten carbide manufacturing capabilities for advanced munitions. There was no economically sensible reason for domestic ballpoint manufacturing, the entire market dominated by Japan and Swiss was only worth 20M. Zero rationale for Chinese industry to coordinate tons of resources for this project outside of national security. The TLDR should be China is scarily efficient at pursing national security goals.

That said metallurgy for engines is hard. My impressions from following Chinese aviation and semiconductor development is that engines are harder. At least on the military front there has been a lot of movement in domestic turbofans this year, they're sufficiently performant, and exceeds in some categories that it looks like they will be replacing Russian engines going forward.

> Yeah exactly metrology is really hard.

I'm a little confused. Do you mean metallurgy?

Metrology is the science of measurement. In context, it means machining very, very precise parts with super-tight tolerances.

I just used the wrong word. It was a typo and I fixed it.

Yes I'll edit my comment.

And maintenance. The biggest differentiator between American and Russian aircraft is that the American aircraft were better maintained. The Russian aircraft were likely more reliable for their given level of maintenance... but they were very, very poorly maintained.

No, right until the fall of USSR, Aeroflot fleets were properly maintained.

American aviation had technological advantage at any point in history.

I would suspect that materials science is underfunded in the West as is any endeavor that takes long investment for long term payoff. China and Japan have been extremely good at patient long-view investment.

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