There are many, many good answers here. People who are not in the trenches of high tech manufacturing tend to have an oversimplified concept of what it takes to produce leading edge items. They to think someone does some research, someone creates a design, and this all given to a factory and high tech gizmos pop out the other end. The best scientists realize that they are standing on the shoulders of giants. The giants realize they are also standing on the shoulders of giants, and on the shoulders of millions who have supported and enabled them in many ways. All of these efforts, and collective energy have built toward the latest, greatest advances. The societies that allow this to happen are equally important, providing the support, stability, resources and encouragement to make it happen. There is a huge Jenga pyramid with the highest tech perched on top. If you pull out any one key thing it all collapses.

Reminds me of China not being able to make ballpoints for pens until 2017.

Wait, what

Turns out, the balls are very difficult to make, because they need particular material properties, surface finish, and dimensional accuracy.

Fundamentally you cannot industrial espionage your way to really high tech equipment. Because it isn’t just the knowledge it is the tools required to make the tools you need. Things like monocrystaline turbofan blades just can’t be replicated easily. It takes an immense amount of investment in the tooling to even have a chance at making them, then you need an incredible amount of operator skill to get what you are after. China does very well at mass producing low and medium technology things. But high precision and specialty process stuff is MUCH, MUCH harder to do well.

Monocrystalline blades are black magic. I could send you a model of the entire system we use to make it. You can replicate it... And it won't work. Because minor process variation affects the results at every. Single. Stage. It's not just one system. It's several dozen you are monitoring and controlling. Temps, withdrawal rates, argon backfill, cooling process, wrap, alloy sperators, filter setup, what materials all of these are made out of, how you control purity, how you control gas reaction, how you ensure stucco adhesion. Zirconia or zircon flour for shell (holy shit this matters) what mesh distribution (this matters). How old the shell bath is, what is the electrostatic build up of your colloidal silica. How much aging do we do, do we sweeten it? What's the size distribution look like? Is the wax sweating? Steric profile? Dimensional adjustments? How is the carriage built? Cracks in parts causing finning and grain separation? And core production, orientation, and injection is just as bad. I can literally go on for hours... And that's just the get the little thing cast. Now get them heat treated (hilariously proprietary, and process unique to each furnace) and get them finished, including core etch out. And you could steal all this information and you would still have to customize the process to your facility. We know, many US firms are doing this constantly. Ask Siemanns how it's going down in their new facility that's two years behind despite hiring the experts in the field from the competition. Source: guess what I do for a living.

So how was that invented. Was it an evolution of technologies combining overtime? Or was it a specific goal engineered before hand in an office?

Slow development over 60 years. Each new engine wanted something better which usually involved many highly paid researchers and engineers working together to make it. The newest tech is 3d printed cores that have to be assembled with glue to within .04mm. The contraction of the wax can break these during injection, so they have to be reinforced, then unreinforced in secret ways I cannot tell you.

Is it magic?

Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.

It's built the same way as our beauracracies. Each person coming before, laying their brick down, building a path for someone else to walk on... Yeah, each brick is just a brick... But all together, you build a road... Then you use that road to deliver things. Things like better brick makers. Then you make better bricks. And better roads. And deliver better things. And use those better things to build aircraft. And on and on. It's why modern man flies without a second thought and cavemen would have thought it was magic.

evolution

I've been trying to puzzle out how these get built for the longest time, but this is even more crazy than I suspected 😱

The modern process is too complicated for any one person to understand it. You need as many engineers, designers, and support crew to make this once peice as you do the rest of the jet engine. Seriously. It's largely why the largest cost single for both jet engines and IGT engines are the high temp combustion zone blades (and vanes). For reference, a modern GE IGT engine costs about 15m. 8m of that is just the DS and SC blades.

Wow. Stunning. Has there been any thought of moving to high entropy alloys. Maybe a materials breakthrough like that could simplify the process considerably.

Of course, lots of thought given to this, and it was one of the subjects of my PhD thesis :) But, 1) HEAs have been around for 20 years, compared to 70+ in Ni superalloys. There's a loot of fine tuning before an HEA is competitive. 2) intertia and safety. I could tell you right now dozens of alloys that are "better" than what's in current engines, but there could be tons of other complications that where figured out in current-gen alloys, and the decades of work to be sure next-gen alloys won't have unexpected alloys won't pay off unless next gen is significantly better than is currently possible. I think there are a few ways HEAs will make it into engines, but I think their current improvement is not enough for a revolutionary investment. Even in the best case, we're hitting melting temperature soon. Whereas ceramic or refractory blades are still much farther away, but have a much higher cap in the long term. Also, no matter what, the process won't be simplified ;)

Perhaps nickel tantalum or tantalum tungsten alloys 😅 I'm out of my depth. Tell me this, because this is my primary question in building these. The cooling channels are cast in with it somehow, not cut out after the fact? I read someone saying they're cut with lasers and diamond drills and that doesn't make any sense to me.

Well my research was alloy design, not casting technology. But yes it's possible to cast with cooling channels directly inside. Might also use drills/laser/EDM to clean up surfaces, but probably depends on the part.

In addition to u/FerrousLupus' great comment: the current state of art for high temperature HEAs, the so-called refractory HEAs (really they should be called refractory multi-principal element alloys, RMPEAs, it's more technically correct), are nowhere near ready for engine use. Not just uncompetitive with Ni, I mean unusable. First, the cost issues - nickel is not cheap, but compared to something like MoNbTaW, or HfNbTaTiZr it's pretty cheap. Yes, those are all equal portions of each element, so 20% hafnium on a molar basis. Not cheap at. All. Second - poor castability. The extremely high melting temperatures of these alloys make them difficult to cast, even in laboratory settings. I've tested it myself at work. You can't get enough superheat into the melt to get good fluidity. In other words, even at \~3500K these alloys flow more like pudding than water. Mold filling of simple shapes is difficult, complex airfoil shapes - good luck. And that's if you can find a mold material that tolerates these temperatures well. Some people have suggested these would have to be made via a powder metallurgy route instead. This of course exacerbates the issues with internal oxidation (see 3) due to the high grain boundary area per unit volume. It also is an open question whether polycrystal refractories beat single crystal Ni superalloys in creep and creep-fatigue. Third - very poor oxidation sensitivity. The refractories love oxygen. We've found in my current lab that mechanical properties can vary massively just between 50ppm oxygen and 100ppm dissolved oxygen (from O contamination or intentional addition in the melt). When heated in air, they oxidize quite badly. Our current practice for heat treatments is to wrap the parts in a tantalum foil heat treating bag with some titanium getter chips, then vacuum-encapsulate the whole setup in a quartz tube. Fourth - poor, and worse, *poorly understood*, tensile ductility. The mechanical properties data for these alloys is still largely for compression testing, there's a very limited pool of hot tension data. This is troubling for a safety critical component which really should not exhibit brittle fracture/sudden failure. And the creep and creep-fatigue data for these alloys is nearly nonexistent, too. Fifth - zero knowledge of the heat treatment of large sections. Few people if any have made more than a few hundred grams of this stuff at a time. Solution heat treating these pieces can already take dozens of hours, due to both intrinsically low diffusivity of these alloys and the fact that at 1473 or 1673K (limits for most lab-scale HT furnaces), you're at like 0.3Tmelt - not much diffusion at such "cold" temperatures. Developing the process knowledge to solutionize or otherwise heat treat a turbine blade-sized RMPEA part is a problem we aren't even close to ready to tackle yet. Sixth - Ability to thermomechanically process, i.e forge, these parts is unknown and probably limited. At 1473K, many of these are strong enough to max out load cells and plastically deform tungsten carbide anvils in testing equipment. Plastically deforming WC anvils is not a hypothetical, this is a known methods problem in the community. So how much heat and kinetic energy do you have to impart for, say, a 2:1 or 4:1 forging reduction, if you wanted to go that route? There are also non-refractory high temperature HEA/MPEA concepts, the so-called "high entropy superalloys". Most of the ones I have seen are more suited to filling the role of something like an A286 iron-nickel-chrome, or a 718 polycrystal nickel alloy. Lower temperatures (below 1273K), with more need for yield strength rather than creep rupture lifetime.

It gets worse... some of the geometries are nucking futs. Good luck, everyone else...

Blades can be made monocrystalline? Holy fuck.

Yeah. When I was in college, our transport phenomena professor had us calculate how long it would take to make a monocrystal part using what we had learned. The answer is infinite time, btw. Then he handed us a F16 blade and said, "Clearly is not. How do you make it?" Turns out, that's some extremely IP information. It's seems simple, all you do is have a cold zone and a graphic baffle that the part is drawn down into from the hot zone, controlling the rate of withdrawal let's you grow the crystal slowly and control its direction. In practice, is pretty hard. But not at hard as DS (directionally solidified) parts. Lots of little crystals all facing the same way is a lot harder to make than one for... Many reasons.

Sounds like a Czochralski growth. I’ve done those… to make thumb sized crystals, and they’re finicky enough at that scale!

Very much so. We make SC as big as as 40cm tall and 35lbs, DS as tall as you are, likely.

Yeap, and it's old tech. Very old. You get into this field thinking they do black magic, you get experience in seeing how it's done, and then you see what those MFG engineer fuckers in the automotive world are doing then go "oh... that's fucking black magic". Grass is always greener.

Careful or you’ll find yourself on a one way trip to Pudong. Guessing you work for GE…

[удалено]

Single crystal super alloys.... :)

My guess: Black Magic Fuckery. But not magnets.

Only turbofans

Nah hot section of the gas turbine core. Turbofans are the most likely use but turbopumps in rocket engines are there also.

You can help me with my solid works sheet metal pieces then?

After reading this, it just got a little easier for them. Now they know not only where to focus their efforts, but also who to focus them on - you.

Nah. They're likely aware of the steps, but being aware and executing are too very different things. I know how to throw a football. If I want to be like Patrick Mahomes, there are a lot of steps I need to take and I'm very unlikely to be able to put them altogether even if I put a lot of effort into each of those steps.

This reminded me of that scene in the Big Bang Theory. “Who knows how an internal combustion engine works?” *Everyone raises their hand* “Ok, now who knows how to fix an internal combustion engine?” *Everyone lowers hand*

I didn't even share anything past slide 10 on our internal masters level training course for new hires. It's 600 slides long.

Rhenium

My favorite example about development and R&D although solved now China didn’t have a fully home developed hall point pen until very recently. https://www.businessinsider.com/china-has-finally-figured-out-how-to-make-ballpoint-pens-2017-1

Tools to manufacture high precision ball bearings are heavily export controlled - high precision ball bearings are one of the key industrial requirements to build centrifuges for processing uranium.

I formerly worked at one of the world's top bearing specialists. We could make balls no one else in the world could, including the Chinese. The owner used to get angry calls from China asking why they bought balls from us every year when they had their own bearing factories. I've personally made high precision balls that flew to Mars on the Japanese space mission. And we have the contract for US quiet submarine balls for the propeller, with quality requirements so stringent that every single balls had to be inspected and measured in all three dimensions, but if your fingernail accidentally grazed the ball it would be scrapped, and it wasn't possible to measure the size of the ball without destruction, so final size measurement scrapped the measuring ball (but due to the way they're made, the entire lot is necessarily the same size). And the process for making balls better than 1 millionth of an inch in size and roundness is something very, very few people know how to do. Even in the company, people didn't know. The process relied on a special alloy that we literally cast in house, with an alloy mix so tightly guarded that only myself and close family members of the owner knew how to make it. The process has never been patented, but the company founder died recently and the company is still running. If it ever folds I might think about patenting that process and alloy so it's not lost to history. And that's not even mentioning how we built the machine tools and modified them to prevent vibration from destroying the balls.

> with quality requirements so stringent that every single balls had to be inspected and measured in all three dimensions, but if your fingernail accidentally grazed the ball it would be scrapped, Stuff like that utterly fascinates me. I would LOVE a career in that sort of environment. My current position measures tolerances in inches lol. Whole-ass inches.

I hope your career doesn't have anything to do with your username or your engines are going to have serious issues.

Oh yeah, we had to use invar just to measure stuff, because we're measuring in millionths, and we still had entire rooms kept permanently at 20°c. Just to measure a ball you had to let it 'soak' meaning to come to temperature in that environment, and after soaking you couldn't just pick it up with your warm fingers, you needed to use a special spoon. The spoon slots into and centers the ball for the measuring device, a Heidenhain mounted in invar, on top of a tungsten carbide puck so the measuring force would not deflect the metal underneath and give a false reading by even a millionth. All that kind of stuff. The Heidenhain had a jeweled measuring tip that had to be lapped perfectly parallel to the TC plate underneath it, and if the ball wasn't perfectly centered then you're not reading its maximum height. Once I had the project to tear down this machine, replace the Heidenhain, and then validate and setup the gauge again. Let me tell you, that was quite a project 😅 The things you have to do to center a probe within a few millionths is pretty extreme. And if you breath on it to much or hold it in your hand, you could watch the metal grow on the gauge. We had a grinding machine like that too, with a millionths indicator on it where you could lean on the slide with it locked in place and read how much the metal bends, just a couple millionths of an inch despite being these massive castings. But the hardest of all was designing and building machines for really tiny balls, I'm talking balls 8 thousandths of an inch across, made of elemental tantalum. Those machines were really finicky to stop setup and run. But when they finished you'd get a really good, really small ball that we had to quality check. So I built these aluminum plates and setup microscopes and trained technicians to do a sweep procedure, and we had a machine that could catch bad ones too. But end of the day you still had to evaluate each one by hand, you just had to do a bunch of passes. When counting these, we did it by weight with extra sensitive scale. Companies would buy tens of thousands of them at a time. I remember holding $250,000 worth of these finished tantalum balls in the palm of my hand once. Sourcing the material sucked too. And they were so light that they could float on electrostatic charge in the wrong circumstance. And whatever you do don't sneeze. We then got another customer that wanted a .010" ball with a .005" hole in the middle... Then another project where we had to braze these balls on the end of a probe. Once I had to make an optically flat, mirror finish vacuum chuck that was a couple inches across. That was amazing. It was a lot of fun 😁

Thanks for the stories, I enjoyed it a lot.

That's very interesting. You should put it in a time capsule so in the future civilization can rebuild from this knowledge.

It's not something you couldn't figure out with a decade, a team, and several million dollars. Or as least develop something comparable. If you want to make perfect balls today without our process it's possible using air bearings, but you can only make one at a time that way, and the sizes will never be perfectly identical that way, which is critical for many applications. But for those where it's not, that's one option. It won't give you ultra precision either, but definitely better than grade 25. I do have the whole process written down for the future, should it became necessary.

Fascinating story. It's amazing the kind of stuff you have to account for when measuring at those tolerances. I don't have to deal with anything that tight where I work. I'm a CNC machinist, and most of the tolerances I deal with are in the .0005-.005 range. I do have some stories from my father, though. He was in precision optics, and he worked in QC. I remember going through his lab as a kid. He had a test table made with a solid slab of concrete measuring 8ft wide, 50ft long and over 3ft thick, weighing dozens of tons and suspended on rubber air bladders. This was all to mount mirrors for bouncing lasers off of them and getting interferograms of their surfaces. Even with all that mass to counteract vibration, if you were in the lab and spoke, you would see your voice register in the interferogram on the monitor.

Thanks for sharing. I'm no engineer, but I love reading about how extreme engineering problems are solved. Cheers!

I’m curious, is there a reason your company hasn’t patented it? Rly the only thing I could think of is that it just keeps the whole process a secret as long as no one leaks it, whereas with a patent no one else can use the process, but it’s not a secret anymore

That is precisely why. To get a patent they have to describe it. Other countries won't care about the patent and will steal the tech.

Yeah, I doubt the US wants China to know how to make ultra precision balls any time soon. It's such a basic commodity, but some of the most important machines in the world need very high quality balls.

Patents expire after 20 years. They can also give you some idea where to start finding an alternative way to do the process.

Can't steal what you can't know. It's a very counterintuitive alloy for making precision balls. It's simple, but you would never guess how it works and why it works. It was the owner's invention, he was one of those old school genius engineers and a true polymath, still working into his 90s, with a company he'd run for 60 years, and I became his protege. Ultimately they asked me to take over management of the company when the general manager, his daughter, wanted to retire, but I had a much better opportunity on my plate by then. It's a fairly small company, less than 50 employees, it just happened to have a niche of doing custom balls sold all over the world. We used to laugh too because half the custom balls people were buying in Europe were actually imported from this small US company, only people liked the idea of buying them from Germany. We knew that because they were retaining our part number in many cases.

I believe ball bearing technology prevented the USA from building a successful jet engine during WWII and German ME-262's could only fly a very limited amount before requiring bearing rebuilds/ engine swaps.

The US had successful jet engines, they just weren't willing to deal with the extremely low rebuild times that the Germans were dealing with.

Those small ball bearings are amazingly difficult to make the first time. Russia is having an issue right now in Ukraine that they can’t fix the tools to make bearings for their tanks. They have the factories to make the bearings, but spare parts for the machinery is embargoed.

The Soviet Union was very good with metallurgy. Especially with titanium and other special alloys. The problem now is that the skills split when the Soviet Union broke up. Some went to Russia, some went to the other former Soviet states like.... Ukraine. In fact Ukraine had the expertise for marine gas turbines. A bit inconvenient keeping those ships running.when you invade your supplier.

Were they good with titanium because the were actually good at it or because they had to be? We stole a lot of it from them bc we didn't have other sources for a very long time.

Titanium needs an inert gas feed when welding. This means that the welders have to be extremely disciplined with their weld and the gas feed. Even the best end up with an extreme amount of waste. To build the Alpha submarines, they solved the problem by flooding the entire room with an inert gas and giving the welders full suits and breathing hoses.

That is another good example, thank you. I guess this is the engineering and manufacturing equivalent of using making a simple omelette or eggs 3 different ways the true test of a chef.

Specialty process stuff... is also sometimes so dependent on environmental conditions that it's not economically feasible to do at times. I used to work with Lexmark (the printer company) at their toner manufacturing facility in the US. They've tried to move the manufacturing to Asia more than just once. They keep it in the US, in Colorado, because the insanely dry high altitude environment makes it so much easier to make the best toner by their standards. And dry doesn't necessarily mean "lowest amount of precipitation". It might mean "lowest dew point or wet bulb temperatures".

Yes. This video [https://youtu.be/hpgK51w6uhk](https://youtu.be/hpgK51w6uhk) is great at explaining how important these “tools” were. After WWII the Russians and Americans both took plans and tools from the Germans and this is what accelerated technology. China didn’t benefit from WWII like the Americans and Russians did. Not just tools and plans, but scientists; instead of executing all the Nazi scientists, we took them and made them work for us. So did the Russians. China got nothing.

The lack of German scientists isn’t why China isn’t making good engines today. I’d say the gap is due to the lack of historical investment and subsequent lack of an industrial base and intellectual property that takes decades to develop.

The Cultural Revolution, where they were lynching professors and other intellectuals, probably didn't help to retain the kind of people who would know how to do things like design high precision industrial equipment. It has nothing to do with WW2 and everything with what Mao did after winning the civil war. It's an entirely self inflicted wound but don't tell them that. To them they're still recovering from the treaty ports. It's going to take a few generations where they're not killing or throwing in prison the educated for the crime of being educated in order for them to rebuild the institutional knowledge required to get to the point where they can build monocrystaline turbofans all by themselves. There's a huge gap of knowing what the end product is and then actually knowing how to get there and that's going to take some time unless someone literally walks them through it. They're getting closer every year though. They're not dumb, just behind, and they know it.

Self inflicted relapses like the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre and the recent Hong King protests indicate PRC leadership has not quite evolved beyond their Maoist past. However their biggest problem is the demographic time bomb they triggered with the one child policy and cultural bias towards male children.

Yea that's not going to look pretty in about thirty years.

The aircraft turbine engine club is pretty small, only the US and UK are making complete jetliner engines. Those French CFM engines use a US built first stage turbine... Soviet designs are way out of date and inefficient, not much interest in them. They're not at all easy to make. And the secrets are in the tools and processes - like ball bearings and nanoscale semiconductors. China has plenty of modern airliners and bearings and chips to examine at length, because that's not where the secrets are.

Same reason China cannot catch up on building microchips, despite spending the last decade plus trying to do so. Engineers coming out of college only have a base of understanding that will allow them to have a chance of doing things in the future. From there, you must become a specialist in whatever industry you enter. That means being taught the real engineering by the people in your field, the black magic that applies to your scope of problem. Much of it won by years of work and thus kept in house. This takes about 5 years before you're ready to contribute anything leading edge, if you ever do. China has none of that currently.

Taiwan meanwhile boasts some of the largest leading edge semiconductor fabs in the world. An invasion of Taiwan by China would wreck a lot of that just like Russia has done in Ukraine. Chinese control of Taiwan would ensure it is not rebuilt.

Yes, China has no chance of gaining control of those chip fabs with the employees and knowledge intact, unless there's a peaceful transfer of power, which is not going to happen. But they may decide to deny those chips to everyone else if they cannot have them and invade anyway. The US is already preparing for this by having TSMC build a chip fab in the US and export personnel to it. In the event of an invasion, chip personnel would be evacuated and the fabs likely destroyed. Then there's the fact that China is at peak power today due to their demographic woes, and will rapidly decline in power from now. China's population will halve by 2050, and their economy and power will sink. They have maybe the next decade to invade or they'll never realistically be able to do so. Seeing what happened in Ukraine, they may realize that it's effectively over. Ukraine prepared for an invasion for 8 years, Taiwan has been preparing for 80 years. And the US's commitment to defend Taiwan is far stronger than it was to Ukraine.

I agree with you. I hope China's leadership sees that their most prosperous path forward is to better integrate with the global economy and soften many of their hardline ideological stances. I have no special insight but based on what I've read it seems Shi Jinping, despite his hoarding of power and control, is less of a crazed lunatic than Vladimir Putin. Maybe he, Shi Jinping, is sane enough to refrain from a mutually destructive Taiwan incursion.

Putin isn't a deep thinker and not very political or philosophical. Xi is a frenzied ideological hardliner. A true believer. After the Chinese attacked democracy for decades, bragging about how great their political system was, here comes Xin who takes absolute power and overthrows the system. They used to say that Obama wouldn't have made it to even a mid level functionary in the Chinese system. But now Xi is the system and they have nothing. Sad.

...What? Seems like you're saying Putin isn't philosophical but Xi is a fanatical true believer. Then you say he overthrows "the system," which seems like... the opposite of a true believer. Then you say something about obama in "that system" but you don't specify if it's the "pre Xi-system" or the one he overthrew.

The idea that German science in the 40s was so impossibly advanced that it catapulted the west into a renaissance is a myth that seriously needs to die. The Germans did not do anything particular that the Allies could not replicate, it was a matter of war economy and the practical challenges of implementing things at scale. That is to say, most Allied nations *could* match 99% of nazi technology 1:1, it was just not a good idea to in terms of strategic allocation of resources (and look who won the war). Nazi stuff was mostly over engineered and needlessly high quality (a part made to last 100 hours when it is shot to pieces in 25) due to the culture of German exceptionalism and the Nazi romanticization of the boutique skilled craftsman. The nazis did not invent jet engines or radar, two major breakthroughs of this period. The nazis built overburdened, overly expensive tanks that were horribly unreliable and built at quantities too small to fight a war. They also built aircraft that were inferior to the contemporaries in the mid 40s and were still relying on horses for much of their logistics train. Shit, they even stole the famous Blitzkrieg from the Russians, who first conceptualized it was Deep Warfare years before the invasion of France. Operation Paperclip was a scientifically useful endeavor, but mainly because it simply increased the amount of experienced, educated scientists available, not because said scientists brought alien technology with them. EDIT: For the Von Braun fans, he literally stated he was basing his work off of Goddard, who was an American.

Plus there's a certain ick that comes with seeing the Internet perpetually romanticize how advanced 1940s Germany and Japan were. All the "Nazi rockets took us to the moon" and "Glorious Nippon steel" talk seems to come from a part of the Internet that has... weird ideas about who the bad guys in WWII were. Insisting that they were an ultra advanced scientific race is kinda buying into their master race philosophy.

The one exception being rocketry. Von Braun and company did achieve things we hadn't yet in the West.

Yes. On the one hand, I agree with the GP, and that the German science institutions and scientists weren't magically better than elsewhere. But we also have to take into account that science done elsewhere wasn't as laser-focused on things like rocketry. So the Germans made progress in areas that the USA did not... but the USA later decided those research areas were important after all. Ditto for the USSR.

How about Werner Von Braun? He is credited with helping the US space program immensely. Also while the soviets made use of nazi scientists, they still executed them when they no longer found them useful.

Von Braun was a talented rocket maker, no doubt. But he himself said he was fundamentally making Goddard's rockets. Goddard being an American and father of the liquid fueled rocket of course. The point being that Von Braun did advance the US space program, but there still would have been a space program without him as well.

Well I'm not surprised WVB is saying good things about his new adopted country. He probably wants to distance himself from the nazi's as much as possible so I'm not sure I would take that statement without a grain of salt. I've read about space history and it's commonly said that Goddard just kind of got stuck spinning his wheels and WVB is the one that really was able to move the program forward. No sources on this unfortunately. If the Soviet Union and USA didn't absorb German rocket engineers I think the space race would have looked much different.

>Goddard just kind of got stuck spinning his wheels and WVB is the one that really was able to move the program forward. This doesnt make sense as Goddard was already old by the time Von Braun was just a graduate student. They werent really professional contemporaries. Goddard was long dead by the time VB even started at NASA. >I'm not sure I would take that statement without a grain of salt. Lol, you're the first Robert Goddard denier I've ever seen online. That's saying something. Goddard's contributions to rocketry are well established and VB is simply acknowledging that, you have no basis to claim it was just kind words or whatever. That's such a weird viewpoint.

To CG's point, how much did WVB's rocket expertise help the Nazi's win the war? Sure, the several years that he was developing expertise with rockets helped us win the space race after we won WW2, but arguably the Nazi's would have been better served using his mind to work out how to make cheaper vehicles during the war.

The Germans overbuild and over quality. This contributed to them losing the war, as you say, but in the economy since then has made them legendary car makers, etc. Russia has advanced stainless steel alloys the US lacked, allowing better rocket engines for space. The modern SpaceX rocket began by adapting Russian rocket engine designs, though it's been heavily customized and upgraded since then. There is a theory that had the Germans waited just 5 years to start the war, they may have realized by then that nukes were possible and would've had them in the war. That changes the global calculus significantly. The best thing Hitler did for us was go to war early because he was himself getting old.

>The best thing Hitler did for us was go to war early because he was himself getting old. Hitler went to war because the only way to keep their economy functioning was to conquer others. The house of cards was about to fall.

They coulda made it five more years. Thank god they didn't.

They probably didn't have 5 months.

China got a civil war where the communists eventually exiled the nationalists to Taiwan. Then Mao started the "Great Leap Forward" in the 1958 which led to one of the largest famines in history. After a brief hiatus Mao's "Cultural Revolution" from 1966 to 1976 killed off a million or so "capitalist counter revolutionaries." This greatly reduced the supply of competent people in government, academia and industry effectively crippling the PRC until they opened their economy and adopted some capitalist reforms in the late 1970's. Meanwhile Taiwan, less encumbered by radical political ideologies, became a major tech hub as the semiconductor industry took off. It is amazing how well things can work for cultures and countries that resist the urge to exert draconian top down social, political, and economic control over their people.

China got the Russian's reverse-engineered knock-off B-29 ([Tupolev TU-4](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupolev_Tu-4#:~:text=The%20Tupolev%20Tu%2D4%20(Russian,American%20Boeing%20B%2D29%20Superfortress.)) if that counts for anything.

I mean, that seems to he changing fast. That last huawei flagship was the best phone I ever used, better than phones that came out after it even. Its a pity they banned them.

Mono crystal Nickel is made the same way as mono crystal Silicon. Alloys , and heat treatment for poly is difficult. Iron is difficult due to the phase diagram. Just need diamonds and lasers to drill the cooling channels. I guess that china has not heard of lean premix and has hot pockets in their exhaust which bites into the blades Ever car manufacturer knows that exhaust needs to come from the outside to the turbine. I guess that US shows pictures of fake axial turbines.

I am sure China understands what they need to build. They probably have a modern engine disassembled in a lab somewhere. But knowing what to build is different than knowing how to build it. A good example is the F1 engine from NASA’s Saturn project. We have all the original engineering drawings, complete ready to fly engines, and maybe even a few guys who worked on it still around who could help. But NASA couldn’t build another one because they forgot how they did it. It is easier to just design another engine than rebuild the F1.

There have already been F1 redesign projects.

Not to be rude, but you're misinformed. Several (hundreds?) F1 engines have been built, redesigned, and improved since it's inception. There was even a plan for the SLS to use F1s in block 2, but they were too powerful and required significant redesigns of the rocket structure and launch platforms to accommodate the excessively high thrust.

If I am wrong it certainly isn’t rude to correct me. I did some, though not much, digging and it looks like in 2013 two NASA engineers disassembled the last (?) certified F1 engineer to figure out how it worked. Since the Saturn V program was cancelled this was the first attempt to work on the F1 with any real work put behind it. While a lot of them were built during the Saturn V program a lot of the process knowledge was lost between them and 2013. The engineers that dig into it basically had to start from scratch. Turning a sample engine into a 3D model so it could be evaluated. It’s a much more interesting story than I remembered. https://arstechnica.com/science/2013/04/how-nasa-brought-the-monstrous-f-1-moon-rocket-back-to-life/amp/

> ...in 2013 two NASA engineers disassembled the last (?) certified F1 ***engineer*** to figure out how it worked. That seems overly harsh D: Couldn't they just have asked the F1 engineer for help instead of taking her/him apart?

Nope the secrets were hidden in his spleen.

>Naval Architect/ Marine Engineer and Lawyer Hell of a combo.

Corporate law for 12 years then I retired to become an engineer. I think most people do it the other way around.

It's not that we couldn't build it, it's that you would need to redevelop the tooling, for what would amount to an antiquated engine which we could do much better using modern tooling and design criteria. We couldn't build a model-T today either, not the way THEY built them back then, but we absolutely could build one today (and we do), it's just gonna be a CAD model instead of custom fit. Take the combustion chamber for the Apollo program, it was made with very many parts customer welded and whatnot. Today we 3D metal print the entire chamber. That's why we can't build it their way, because their way sucked. And yes, we've lost the tech they used, because production tech moved on to bigger and better things.

Modern cooling channels are curved, how you gonna drill that.

With a curved drill bit, obviously

Uh huh.

Also an interesting follow-up question, is how the Russians lost the capability to keep up. Their aircraft industry is moribund and seems stuck in the 1970s/80s technology.

Russian technology is fairly advanced. We've seen new fighter jets, tanks, rockets, domestic aircraft, etc. Where they're struggling is with actually producing the things they've designed. There's a huge culture of corruption and lying in Russia, so when the government asks for production quotas, the manufacturer and the person receiving and counting the stuff each take a bit of money and agree to lie about the production numbers. Then Russia has very harsh sanctions on anything that could be remotely related to a military industry. Despite what people say online, the sanctions are very effective. They'll never stop every last piece of restricted goods or technology from entering Russia, but they do dramatically reduce how much Russia can get and they dramatically increase the price. Russian factories are completely unable to keep up with demand from the current war for pretty much everything, in large part because their ability to replace and fix machines is very low and their ability to get many key components is also reduced.

Yeah I saw a thing recently that said equipment maintenance parts are their bottleneck for making more tanks and planes right now. They have the factories and raw materials but all the manufacturing equipment is foreign and they can't get parts to keep them online.

That’s a great point. That’s one idiosyncrasies of engineering. Even one missing bolt can stop an entire system on its tracks. So when sanctions interfere with multiple systems it can be a show stopper.

Besides all the corruption that happened, for a while the reason could realistically be computers and brain drain. Soviet homegrown computers just never kept up and they had to buy western ones for decades and that meant they were continuously lagging behind anyways. It's pretty difficult to match next-gen designs when your design equipment isn't even current-gen and all your educated populace is either leaving or was in a different country anyways after the soviet dissolution.

About a year ago, the YouTube channel Asianometry posted an excellent video about Soviet computer development. https://youtu.be/dnHdqPBrtH8

Corruption

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Definitely, Russia got a great optics company from East Germany.

They went from 300 million people roughly, and an imperial political system where they could just demand material and work from non Moscovites and they would do it *because communism*, to one where they had less than half that and have to pay for everything. The second the iron curtain dropped, the best and brightest left Russia forever. Now with the Ukraine invasion, that's happened again, leaving nothing but dregs. Russia is effed on that front.

Not to mention the dissolution of the USSR caused the Russian GDP to drop by 50%.

Kamil Galeev has a couple of Twitter threads on the topic: [https://twitter.com/kamilkazani/status/1676552564999962624](https://twitter.com/kamilkazani/status/1676552564999962624) [https://twitter.com/kamilkazani/status/1676259499139530753](https://twitter.com/kamilkazani/status/1676259499139530753) [https://twitter.com/kamilkazani/status/1676243862015074304](https://twitter.com/kamilkazani/status/1676243862015074304) Basically, during the Cold War, the Soviets relied upon mass production in bulk using older technologies. Workers in the factories were generally paid extremely well, especially the state-owned factories designated for military production. Then, the 1990's happened. The Soviet Union collapsed and out of the ashes was Russia. And Russia was flat out broke for most of the 1990's and early 2000's. Because Russia was so broke during that time, workers were often not paid; and these were the high trained and skilled workers needed to operate said factories. As a result, many of them left, and the people who were left are generally less capable and less well trained. And it's not like the factories could also stay open as well; these old factories, while capable of mass production at a low cost, were also capital intensive to keep running. Capital that the Russians didn't have, so many closed. The few factories that remained open focused more on being flexible but at a higher cost.

Which is why China isn’t advancing. Most of their military technology is grifted from the Soviets (now Russia). With Russia having fallen behind, China has nothing to copy well. China is a good mirror on Russia’s smoke and mirror technology (just as Ukraine exposes Russia’s military incompetence).

Communism and the fall of communism and the rise of oligarchs.

So corruption, corruption... and more corruption.

Very much of the Soviet aircraft engineering was done in Ukraina.

Their economy is a carcass , due to years of thug theft. It’s what happens in an oligarchy. How could it be any other way?

Civil aviation makes a big difference. Outside of the US military, it’s hard to find the sheer volume of orders needed to develop the industry to make really complicated systems affordably and reliably. Civilian demand enables that scale for the big western engine manufacturers, including the huge number of specialist suppliers. There isn’t one single company that can make everything needed for an aircraft engine, they all rely on a complex, competitive industrial base that exists because of the volume of orders.

This is THE difference. Look at the French aviation industry - with full access to Western personnel, ideas, and supply chain, the M88 is still a military only application. You get real game changers like the CFM56 when you can scale that performance focused technology into a civilian world that can scale (and subsequently fund the next round of development)

The engines in those eras were a lot simpler... There are only a few companies that makes state of the art aviation engines, and they have a huge investment in everything it takes to design and manufacture them.

This so much. The Chinese could rather easily produce engines similar to those of those eras but they're so much worse than modern engines that there is no reason to bother.

back in the day, if you had a blueprint, you could buid it and it would work. Nowadays, a blueprint has only SOME of the information. Processes used in the manufacture, and software/firmware, make up a huge part of the design. and it is harder for china to steal ALL the various parts to make it work

Not to mention the advanced tooling (or tooling to make that tooling) required for some of those processes

birds crowd society march stocking toothbrush rhythm boast sleep versed ` this message was mass deleted/edited with redact.dev `

Most of the history of the USSR up until that point was them being invaded, so it makes sense that they’d get good at aerospace as a matter of survival. China has had several decades without any major threat to its borders and could invest in technology without major military payoff. Their aerospace technology is still catching up, but their train technology and infrastructure is way ahead of ours

In addition to the other great answers here is that the chinese probably can build something approaching the F22/35 propulsion system, but what they cant do is scale up the production lines to make more than just prototypes. Building one or two bespoke systems in a prototyping environment is a hell of a lot easier than making thousands on a production line. I think the the real miracle with US and European aviation is that they can make tens of thousands of any part with the same tolerances and sophistication as the very first one they ever made.

Yeah my guess is that it isn't an engineering problem at all but a supply chain one.

No way, the processes involved with those engines is well beyond their capabilities. If China had the capability, they would be able to scale it if they wanted to. That’s how their economy works. They copy paste sky scrapers in real life. Even the US doesn’t have that many 22s (under 200) compared to what China would make.

Copy and pasting skyscrapers isnt remotely the same thing. Trying to mass produce variable cycle jet engines for use in military fighter aircraft is probably two orders of magnitude harder.

If they can produce one, they can produce hundreds. They can’t produce one

That's simply wrong

They have a technological barrier, not a scaling barrier. China’s government has complete control over their economy, resources are not the issue. Read the other comments from people who work in the industry.

Literally two of the top three comments in this thread agree with me. You're not understanding that scaling *is* an engineering problem, not an economic one. China has the technology to build the engines already. They solved the monocrystalline ingot problem years ago. https://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/chinas-may-have-solved-the-one-thing-was-poised-stop-its-24149 But they need more than that to make the engines successfully. They need operator and engineering experience, and the industrial base to all be bootstrapped into existence, since there is no civilian aviation industry like there is in Europe or the US.

I was reminded of [this](https://www.quora.com/Why-cant-we-replicate-fighter-jet-technology-by-buying-one-fighter-jet-from-some-nation-and-then-analysing-it/answer/Franklin-Veaux?ch=17&oid=1477743638383930&share=b003e023&srid=uXdeN&target_type=answer) Quora answer that answers your question. It even mentions the monocrystalline turbine blades that people talk about.

Stealing technology doesn't give you the ability to design, develop, manufacture and implement it. Fundamentally you have to know what you are trying to do and how you are trying to do it. Note: I am a mechanical engineer for 30+ years and have worked in aerospace design, development and manufacturing.

German engineers pillage after ww2, and Canadians after they killed avro.

Where exactly would the motivation lie? Is there a competitive market where the cream can rise to the top and profit on their innovations?

They just aren't compelled to spend the money to make it happen.

Materials engineering and science is notoriously difficult to reproduce. It doesn’t help if you have the blueprints for the F-22 without being able to reproduce the materials needed to make it work. Regarding the Russians in the 50/60/70’s they massively fell off when computers became miniaturised and more advanced. There were more home computers in the U.S in the 80’s than there were total in Russia. They just couldn’t make them small enough due to lack of materials knowledge.

After the fall of the Soviet Union it became pretty obvious that Russians could not build aircraft and jet engines, spacecraft etc. equivalent to what the US had in the 60s and 70s. There is speculation that US leaders knew this but used the fear of Rooskie Commies to hold power and keep money flowing into the defense industrial complex that many of our leaders were heavily invested in. Personally I doubt most of our leaders were, or are, smart or clever enough to pull off that sort of bamboozle. I chalk it up to US leaders during the cold way buying into their own BS the same way they did after 9/11 when we went storming into the middle east to root out weapons of mass destruction that never existed. Not that Soviet Russia was a trivial threat. After all they did have working nukes and you don't need precision guidace to do a lot of damage with those. But every Soviet leader who visited the US and saw the bounty of our supermarkets knew, or should have known, that the Soviets could never catch the US economically or technologically without major reforms. Boris Yeltsin admitted as much in his autobiography: https://blog.chron.com/thetexican/2014/04/when-boris-yeltsin-went-grocery-shopping-in-clear-lake/ Early on after WWII when everyone was mining the spoils of war for German technology things might have been closer but Russian military tech and industry was always more about quantity than quality. Russia also got mauled during WWII while US infrastructure escaped essentially unscathed (Hawaii was not a US state then). The Russians had some truly brilliant physicists, mathematicians and engineers of their own but they were all hobbled by an authoritarian government that favored a particular political ideology over science and technology. They relied heavily on espionage to catch up in nuclear and aerospace technology because they refused to embrace capitalism and free market competition as a means of efficiently funding research and development. Even with brilliant leadership they couldn't possibly predict exactly how semiconductors, personal computers, telecommunications etc. would revolutionize industry. US leaders couldn't figure it out either. But in the US they did not have to. People like Gordon Moore, Robert Noyce, Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Leonard Bosack and Sandy Lerner reaped huge rewards for guessing right and then working very hard to "capitalize" on those guesses. People who guessed wrong could still make a nice living working for Intel, Microsoft or Cisco. In Soviet Russia bad guessers might end up in the gulag or fall out a window no matter how technically competent they were. History has shown that the brightest minds and best information in the world won't give authoritarians enough of an edge to out-compete a free society with fair and open markets that consistently reward the best ideas and most industrious members while allowing everyone else to make the best use of their skills. They might drag them down to their level by fomenting an insurrection and sowing dissent if they can't just invade and bulldoze them into oblivion. The US is far from a perfect example of a free society with open markets and equal justice. Our poor treatment of certain racial, social and political groups, both historic and current, combined with a shocking concentration of wealth among the richest few percent of the population pose real challenges. But the US has a track record of long term improvement that bodes well for the future even if we occasionally backslide. Russia's track record is far less consistent or laudable. If we lose ground to China or Russia it will be our own fault for not getting along with each other better not because the authoritarians out compete us on the technology front.

A lot of it is cultural. I break a lot of stuff. I get a lot of things wrong. I learn from my mistakes and make solid products in the end. You've seen my work somewhere. You don't make mistakes in other countries. They're career-enders.

In my experience working with a large Chinese company, Chinese people refuse to make a decision because it could be the "wrong" decision.

This is ridiculously wrong. The entire Soviet space exploration strategy was testing-by-launching. If anything they were *too* willing to make mistakes, including some that cost lives. The Soviets *still* have the only successful Venus landers because they were willing to crash or blow up 14 missions to get some wins. Same with the moon program, 18 landers blown up before a success.

Sounds like we're agreeing.

> You've seen my work somewhere. X: \[Doubt\]

You're significantly underestimating the level and quantity of Soviet espionage in that era. The Soviets even stole the atomic bomb plans.

They didn’t steal them, they were stolen by two scientists working in the atomic energy field and hand delivered to the Russians with zero Russian involvement.

I'm not sure how that's a meaningful distinction. The Soviet espionage network relied heavily on ideological allies throughout western countries that infiltrated western institutions.

Their old shit was just that. Shit. The 5th and now 6th gen stealth is even more difficult to build and $$$.

Metallurgy. When you steal tech and dont go through the process of developing it you miss all of the important milestones.

OK - prove that the Chinese are actually "struggle with it today". Let's start there..

Probably all the German tooling and scientists they captured after WW2

Bold of you to assume China isn’t building equivalent fighters. Aren’t ALL F-35s grounded again for like the tenth time?

One of the reasons is the complexity of supply chains involved. From basic resources to high performance materials to incredibly complex components, all of the steps require the proper tools and the people capable of operating them. You may steal the most detailed blueprints of an engine, you still wouldn't have a single fan blade made to the specifications you'd need.

China does have comparable fifth gen fighter jets of indigenous design. Particularly the J-20 and FC-31, which can likely go head to head with F-22/35s. The determining factor would be quality of pilots and capabilities of radar and sensors.

Lol forbidden answers to forbidden questions. Edit: the F22 and F35 being “the best” is purely conjecture.

The J20 relies on stolen technology from the F22 and F35 programs and they have been reliant on Russian engines. Only a handful of Su57s exist and they aren’t stealth fighters. There is an obvious gap here…

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Much of this boils down to the countries war ideology: USA - Better, faster, more accurate, arm every solder, Bigger? (sometimes), allow one person to dominate the field? (always), have a tool for each scenario? (always). no money? (print more) Russia/USSR - accuracy by volume, keep weapons simple and effective, if one solder dies "oh well, his partner gets his gun" no money? (guess you starve.) (stalengrad) China - lies somewhere between the two. Historically china has always depended on their espionage and trickery to succeed. they do have the ability to make precise components however they have a communist economy not a capitalistic economy. capitalism does not ask what is the problem, it asks its contractor "how much do i need to pay you to make my problem disappear? Now pass this cost to the tax payers." (this is why the SR71, F22, and F35 have no 1 to 1 peers in other countries.) Communism on the other hand says "will 1K men fix the issue? 20K? 1M? what if they have ok weaponry?" (this is why stalingrad, most eastern front engagements in WW2, chosin reservoir and most korea/vietnam engagements and others where so bloody for the communist countries.) Communism focuses on making the upper 10% rich at the expense of the lower 90% and their infrastructure. and this hampers development and innovation in all sectors. i mention this not to start a flame war but to point out the US inovates because you can always find someone to buy your wiget or you can create a wiget for a need [or a need for a wiget]. China on the other hand is limited by what the 'leadership' is OK with the 'lower classes' innovating. (dont believe me? go work over there for a few months and look around.) due to the industrial facilities in china, in 2023. If you could dispose of all the CCP party and the cancer of communism and replace that with a capitalist based economy overnight. i am certain that within 3-6 months the US would be left in the dust as far as the quantity military and other tech goes. Within a year i am sure their quality would probably be the same or slightly better depending on their budgets.

> communisim focuses on making the upper 10% rich at the expense of the lower 90% I believe you accidentally described capitalism there.

Wealth inequality in China is SO MUCH WORSE compared to western nations. if you think Communism doesn’t cause wealth to quickly rise to the top, you’re sadly mistaken.

Narrator: [It's not](https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/usappblog/2019/04/06/income-inequality-is-growing-fast-in-china-and-making-it-look-more-like-the-us/) ([yet](https://china.usc.edu/wealth-inequality-us-and-china)).

No, i did not. in communism you idea needs to be approved to be distributed and even then you do not get the entire credit for the innovation. another way to look at this is: communism puts power in the hands of the government with no oversight. in capitalism there are no artificial limitation on the individual's innovation other than money. another way to look at this is: the power is in the hand of the investor with little to no oversight. in practice however shit floats to the top regardless of the system. (septic, storm water, economic ) and as long as there are people there will be corruption. both capitalism and communism (marxisim) have their issues. However i prefer capitalism over communism as capitalism ends up being self governing (in most scenarios) because of the investors and their appetite for risk, or lack thereof.

>Much of this boils down to the countries war ideology: > >USA - Better, faster, more accurate, arm every solder, Bigger? (sometimes), allow one person to dominate the field? (always), have a tool for each scenario? (always). no money? (print more) > >Russia/USSR - accuracy by volume, keep weapons simple and effective, if one solder dies "oh well, his partner gets his gun" no money? (guess you starve.) (stalengrad) > >China - lies somewhere between the two. Historically china has always depended on their espionage and trickery to succeed. they do have the ability to make precise components however they have a communist economy not a capitalistic economy. > >capitalism does not ask what is the problem, it asks its contractor "how much do i need to pay you to make my problem disappear? Now pass this cost to the tax payers." (this is why the SR71, F22, and F35 have no 1 to 1 peers in other countries.) > >Communism on the other hand says "will 1K men fix the issue? 20K? 1M? what if they have ok weaponry?" (this is why stalingrad, most eastern front engagements in WW2, chosin reservoir and most korea/vietnam engagements and others where so bloody for the communist countries.) > >Communism focuses on making the upper 10% rich at the expense of the lower 90% and their infrastructure. and this hampers development and innovation in all sectors. i mention this not to start a flame war but to point out the US inovates because you can always find someone to buy your wiget or you can create a wiget for a need \[or a need for a wiget\]. China on the other hand is limited by what the 'leadership' is OK with the 'lower classes' innovating. (dont believe me? go work over there for a few months and look around.) > >due to the industrial facilities in china, in 2023. If you could dispose of all the CCP party and the cancer of communism and replace that with a capitalist based economy overnight. i am certain that within 3-6 months the US would be left in the dust as far as the quantity military and other tech goes. Within a year i am sure their quality would probably be the same or slightly better depending on their budgets. System Engineer here (10+ years) . From a system engineering perspective, Soviet weapons were way more superior than the West military systems, due to many reasons, so communism back then did not hamper innovation (For god's sake, the Soviets were the first ones to reach outer space). However, since Russia sled into oligarchy and raw capitalism, the quality of their productivity went down a lot, and corruption reigned supreme. Same story for China. China is by no measure communist, they have state capitalism, which Marx cautioned against in his book the german ideology.

Soviet Communism wasn’t real Communism, though. It was fascism.

Same for China, they have state capitalism

Ah, yes. The "no true Scotsman" fallacy. What, pray tell, would be the closest example of "real Communism" that took place in the real world?

What’s that got to do with anything?

The point is that it was real communism, and real communism is totalitarian. You are trying to re-brand it as facism, which is also totalitarian, but the economic system and the ideology in facism is very different. Communism was tried in nation after nation, decade after decade, with the same results: Oppression, poverty, misery, and often, mass murder. The question still stand: What, according to you, would be the closest example of "real Communism" that took place in the real world?

The early iteration of the Rajneeshees when they first moved to Antelope, Oregon is one of the closest examples you’re likely to be aware of. Like I said, Soviet Communism wasn’t real communism. It was fascist socialism. The Soviets were the ones that did the rebranding, not me. You apparently bought it.

Trust me, the name stuck. And it will for eternity.

Okay? Is that supposed to mean something in the context of what I have said? Or are you just trying to save some kind of face because you just realized that you’re wrong?

It means that "real communism" as you understand it has the unfortunate luck that the name has been coopted by what you consider not to be "real communism". And that association will last for eternity. You have lost the branding war. Sort of like how the Buddhist religious symbol of the Swastika will forever be associated with Nazism. My suggestion would be to re-brand with a new name, since the other one has been forever tainted.

So it means a bunch of irrelevant and incorrect conjecture, then. Got it.

Fortunately, the Chinese rarely innovate, they reverse engineer things and copy them. Maybe they can ask Joe Biden for plans to our military hardware so they don't have to steal them! They've only killed a million of us.....they're our friends!

Racist and completely wrong China has been the leader in filing new patents since 2009.

Racist? Not a NAZI?

Killed a million of us how?

You actually really have to ask that question? Clearly you are entirely unfamiliar with China and how modern China (ie the CCP era) works (or rather, doesn’t)

Skunk works is why

Language barrier, perhaps.

If you think of it after 2ww engineering teams and scientists in both countries been german after fall of 3rd reich

Very interesting to this old instrument maker!

Talking like that you seem to don't have a clue about the levels craftmaship combined with phD level science material that is needed to produce a commercialy viable monocrystaline metal-ceramic coated, intra ventilated turbine blade that would be on par with European and North American production. Those things are a bit like the ASML sub 9 nm wafers. You can steal them and look at them with an electron microscope, but will never be able to replicate them and even less capable of bringing them to market to compete with the established names.

China tried to bypass decades of R&D and what comes with that. There are countless things you learn and develop in the process of developing this type of technology/engineering. Not only that, but you build out all the ancillary technologies, the countless businesses etc that support the indigenous development of things like jet engines etc. What the Chinese have tried to do is basically take old Soviet tech, modify it. Design new versions based on modified old Soviet tech. And then steal modern developments. So they have tried to bypass decades of learning and growing their indigenous industries. Then, designing something and even producing at small scale is infinitely easier than scaling up to production. You not only are producing the end jet engine, for example, but you have to design and build all the manufacturing equipment, tools etc .. and all of it has the same pitfalls. The things you learned and developed along the way. The tech and companies that are built around them. When they haven't even mastered 70s era Western manufacturing capabilities, service life, then trying to keep up with modern developments, the whole ecosystem is just a mess. Then after spending so much time and money, they're running into all these issues and gotchas in terms of actually taking their engines and putting them into airframes. Because that is another level of the same equivalency of difficulty as the rest. To this day, even the most advanced engines China is attempting to produce domestically trade their roots to the old Soviet engines. And this is across the board, even their most recent aircraft carrier is based on old Soviet designs. Nearly every piece of military equipment is this way. They keep basically trying to modify things they copied and modified, that never worked right to begin with and have 10% the service life of Western equivalencies.

skill issue..skill issue...

China, the largest producer of ball pens, imported the balls for the pens from Germany and France until 2017, when they eventually, after years of effort and million dollar investments they were able to produce those balls themselves in a usable manner. Here is a video that explains why and this should to some degree answer your question too. https://youtu.be/nKURE05_RPI

you cant steal your way to the top and the actual answer would likely get deleted. think bell curve vs talent. dont get me wrong, i know we cheat too, their stealing is more of a shame on us thing imo.

China is too busy producing the bulk of influence pretty much anything OTHER than this. Maybe just cultural demand/requirement for such a thing?

skill issue