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It's not all that hard to build a jet engine. Nazi Germany built them being constantly bombed, with actively sabotaging slave labor. Starving North Korea builds
by anovikov 2y ago
It's not all that hard to build a jet engine. Nazi Germany built them being constantly bombed, with actively sabotaging slave labor. Starving North Korea builds them. War-torn Ukraine builds them.
What's hard is to build a competitive jet engine. And there, it happens naturally, by itself: the best marketable jet engine is the one where marginal increase of complexity and cost matches marginal fuel savings: buy simpler/cheaper ones and you waste more money on fuel than you save buying the engine, buy a more complex/expensive one and you don't justify the costs with your fuel savings.
Because an engine runs for tens of thousands of hours - some over 100K hours - so 1% of performance improvement is worth ~1000 tons of fuel - there is a lot of complexity that can be pushed into the solution while still being profitable - and competition ensures this is the case.
That's why it is incredibly hard to make a competitive jet engine.
- maxglute 2y agoIIRC leading fuel efficient turbo jet cost like ~10m + 1m for maintenance and consumes 70m worth of fuel over 30k hour life time. An engine 15% less fuel efficient would have to cost $0 to be competitive.
- anovikov 2y agoSee. But building a jet engine that "just works" without a particular profitability is not at all hard. Like, one that burns 50% fuel for same thrust than the best state of the art. That's about the level of disposable engines used in cruise missiles and drones.