Hacker News Reader

Comment by seanmcdirmid | Hacker News Reader

Material engineering is the well known blocker for China, same with semiconductors. They basically have to replicate 50 years of trial and error that is well kept under lock in key in the west.

China hasn’t mastered chips either yet in the same way it hasn’t mastered jet turbines: they can do cheap (high yields, low maintenance costs per hour of use), they can do high performance, they can’t do both yet at the same time.

View on HN

CJ1000A is being certified by 2028. It is equivalent to LEAP engines on fuel burn. WS15 and WS19 are all shipping today and have thrust to weight ratio above 10. CJ2000 is a 35-ton trust, genx fuel burn class engine, on track for 2030.

Like all of high performance Chinese engines, the CJ1000A won’t be commercially viable if it has to be overhauled for every 100 hours of flight time. There is a reason China still imports most of the jet turbines it uses.

Once China figures out how to have both at the same time, they will basically take over the worldwide market, let alone their domestic market.

>"50 years of trial and error that is well kept under lock in key in the west."

Bollocks. Russia does that as well, single crystal turbine blades in particular so the west is not the sole gatekeeper here. Given the circumstances Russia might as well share the tech for some things in return

I doubt that very much. 20ish years ago I read about the Indians being very upset that the engines in the Sukhoi fighters they bought weren't even making it to the promised (very modest) 300 operating hours between overhauls. That's far less than Western engines routinely achieve. And with the hollowing out of the Russian industrial base that's occurred since then, I'd be surprised if it's gotten any better in the intervening years.

Cheap AND high performance. There is a reason Russian passenger jets are often engined with western jet turbines even though Russia makes their own.

One more factor: Similar to how this works in semiconductors, some things are just too expensive to build without having an economy of scale.

Does Russia do it at comparable yield at the same quality level? India can do single crystal turbine blades too, but at a small scale.

Russia is a backwards mongol empire. This is the official narrative on HN, don't you dare suggesting otherwise.

“ well kept under lock in key in the west”

You’re joking. These have been put on network drives since early 2000s and CCP has hacked and exfil them

the people who do a good chunk of materials science research have last names like wang, li , zhang

you don't exactly need to hack a network drive when you can just hire the guy who came up with it

> have last names like wang, li , zhang

It's not clear to me whether you already knew that those three names in particular are idiomatic in China as the names of 'random' people. 张三，李四，王五.

(Traditionally 李 was the most common surname in China. Last I heard it had been overtaken by 王.)

I don't know who random guys One and Two are.

Then where are the jet engines?

Turns out knowledge alone isn't enough. I mean the knowledge of how to build a nuke, a microprocessor, or a rocket that can go to Mars is public information, yet building them remains elusive for a lot of countries.

It's not actually public knowledge how to build modern, small still capable microprocessors, afaik.

It turns out that they’ve really been able to keep the material sciences data under wraps. It is also really hard to reverse engineer from end products. Same with the C919.

So like...bone china then?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com