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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.
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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