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Notes -
Game of Drones - so I was thinking whether the war in Ukraine will lead to China catching up in one of the two areas that they are behind so far from the west - jet engines. Russia started moving from piston to jet for their drones, their appetite is voracious and it plays right where China historically has started their conquest of the supply chain - the bottom. So this is a perfect storm for knowledge gathering - ability for rapid iteration, great demand for performance and customer that has high failure tolerance.
Do you really need a jet engine for loitering munition? At that point it’s just a cruise missile.
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Probably not. As I understand it, China has been investing a lot of money into domestic jet engines for decades. The marginal opportunities from an active conflict are small by comparison.
Espionage isn’t going to be enough, either. The U.S. was literally collecting Nazi experts and still took years to integrate early jets. China has picked all that low-hanging fruit.
I remember reading an article about China’s difficulties called something like “why jet engines are hard.” It wasn’t the Construction Physics article, which focuses on the West. I thought it was older than this, too. If I find it, I’ll let you know.
The article you still linked reminded me of how a similar issue affects submarine designs. Even when the Soviets knew all the science they needed to know to build submarines as quiet as the Americans, they were unable to match them because the desired quality, quietness, was directly corelated with the precision of the manufacturing, which is a capability that is not built on knowledge that you can steal by copying someone else's answer sheet, but on decades of expertise up and down the whole manufacturing chain.
Of course, the danger though is that the west might currently be in the process of losing that edge entirely, as decades of overemphasising academic and cultural pursuits for young people leads to no one being left to carry industrial knowledge forward as the baby boomers retire and die.
Exactly. Precision manufacturing requires a lot of things to go right. Then they have to be provably right, which was a recurring problem for the Soviet system.
I think the latter danger is real but not for that reason. Comparative advantage pushed Americans out of manufacturing. We still produce excellent technical professionals*, but they have little incentive to start up an industrial plant. The money is in finance, pharma, software.
When I was in college, the perception of academia was already pretty grim. People were aware of the employment prospects and the shift towards adjunct professors. It’s hard to imagine it getting better in the last ten years.
I’d say cultural work has also taken a beating, though that’s even more subject to my bubble. This is a damn cynical generation. Are they really eager to fight over the last scraps of journalism? Of mass culture?
* I wanted to show this via bls.gov, but the data retrieval tool was “under maintenance.”
After a friend wanted to talk about it, I listened to Smarter Every Day on the problems with capitalism stemming from his trying to "manufacture" something 100% in the us. One of his lament is the lack of metal stamping. And while of course there are many sneaky hard things, I strongly believe that there are plenty of smart technical people in the US that could figure it out in relatively short order with the incentives were there. Especially at the level of stamping BBQ scraper handles.
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I'm not sure that's a particularly promising path to success. The jet engines you put on drones (or, with a few caveats, classic fighter jets) don't have much in common with commercial jet engines for airliners. The latter are much more complex. Requirements on fuel efficiency and reliability are much, much less forgiving in commercial aviation. Catching up with the last 10% on fuel efficiency while pushing time-on-wing past 20k hours will be a gigantic effort.
I expect Chinese industry to be perfectly capable of mass producing drone jet engines today. It's just not very difficult to build one that's better than a piston engine. And they already have mass production of a domestic design of military jet engines, after all (until recently, they just weren't all that good - but certainly good enough for drone operations). They also have decades of experience designing and building (ground bound) heavy duty natural gas turbines.
Whether they will catch up with the west on commercial aviation jet engines is mostly a matter of investment. If they decide to invest the resources, it's only a matter of time. But its enormously difficult, so I'd say its unclear if they'll do that and if it's even worth all that much if/when they succeed.
Yeah, I know a guy who makes and sells mini (micro?) jet engines in his garage. TBF, he has nice fabrication machines in his garage, but still. I'd have to confirm how much thrust they actually produce, but production at that level of sophistication is probably sufficient for something that needs to take one attack drone on one trip, without significant efficiency concerns, and a reasonable failure rate is acceptable.
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Isn't China's issue the metallurgy rather than the mechanics? I think they could fix that if they throw enough time, money, and researchers at it. Certainly they graduate an absurd number of materials engineers every year, but if they're like the US almost none of them do metallurgy.
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