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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2801 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 9, 2026

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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.

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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