Chinese Hypersonic Developments (HGVs/HCMs)

latenlazy

Brigadier
the article is paywalled, so I will just respond based on your comment and other's comments.

imo, there is nothing wrong with the Chinese alternative here. Writing simulation software isn't difficult. It's possible that American chips and software are a little better, so Chinese MIC used them. But if they are not available, Chinese MIC will just use domestic alternatives. People that write these articles fundamentally don't seem to understand anything about technology.
So following up on this point though, I actually just had a conversation with some coworkers about simulation software last week, and apparently you have to do a lot of discrete modeling with experimental validation once you get to more complex dynamics. I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of the technical insufficiencies of Chinese solutions come down to extensiveness of discrete modeling libraries. Those are the sorts of things you need to build up experimentally and would be very valuable to development work, enough to want to discriminate against different software packages.
 

AssassinsMace

Lieutenant General
Because of Biden's action on chips to China is seen as the nuclear option, you'll be seeing "think tanks" and journalists throwing out ideas in other areas as well to get Biden to press the button there too. That's what it means. Remember Pinkov was considered a Chinese military expert quoted by the media. Or how about Gordon Chang who the media calls him a Chinese military expert who claims that Pakistan is domestically making the JF-17 fighter when China is pushing them to buy its FC-1 fighter instead...

I remember back early 2000s there was a guy who was a member of an old famous rock band, I can't recall which, who all of the sudden was going around TV being called an expert on world affairs. He wasn't wearing a suit and tie. He was dressing like an old rocker. And I'd see him talking about the then imminent invasion of Taiwan by China. All he said was stuff already out there but to people who don't care it would be new to them. I especially laughed at when he kept emphasizing Chen Shui-bian's name because in America if a white person can pronounce a foreign name that must make you know something. He actually sounded more like a first day language student. Funny thing is I haven't seen him since. So how did he all of the sudden become an expert on world affairs out of no where. It must be because since this guy was a in a popular rock band and he's just repeating Republican talking points on world affairs, he's considered an expert. The Republicans to this day who despite despising Hollywood are desperate for famous people that like them. That's how you become an expert.
 

ougoah

Brigadier
Registered Member
It's not difficult to imagine that Chinese academies and research centres indeed use a lot of American developed softwares. Even in less specialist fields, China has a lot of dependence on American software from various CAD stuff to even word processing and Excel.

This isn't particularly an issue since these do indeed count as having better "technical foundations". It costs decades and billions to develop this stuff and the Americans have began their journey to technical dominance since day 1 of every technological revolution of the 20th century. It isn't a weakness per se but a dependence on it and a total absence of domestic equivalents that are similarly effective, is a weakness that would take a lot of time to resolve unless teams are able to essentially create a 1:1 Chinese replication of the various software and then build on that.

The issue here is there just isn't the same level of market forces working to make this a reality for every field and every piece of software. We have Chinese CAD and equivalents for mainstream stuff but highly specialised ones remain a question. Maybe projects for CAS and gov institutions because there is close to zero monetary return from market forces. Engineers and developers will get paid but they won't be able to sell it to state owned aerospace organisations in the same way American ones would sell to LockMart etc.

For the time being, the current solutions are clearly fine and works well. US can't exactly sanction it since there are copies of the software, perhaps even as far as being domesticated entirely. The potential issue is the slower rate of progress as there isn't a mechanism for incentivising and building a strong foundation of domestic equivalents that continue working on better ones.

Then again China's technical talents are pretty much being used to capacity and spread out. Maybe incentivising people toward these directions is something that's already been happening. After all, Chinese software talent seem to be more focused on social application software. Does China even have a Matlab equivalent yet?
 

tphuang

Lieutenant General
Staff member
Super Moderator
VIP Professional
Registered Member
lol, software really shouldn't take decades to develop. If you are taking that long, then you need to hire new developers. It is what it is. As I said in the IC thread, software really shouldn't be all that hard. It may be hard to perfect, but you can have good enough software for much less development time. Just take a look at Microsoft suite. Microsoft has been working on it for 30 years, have things really improved that much since early 2000s? Not for the average user.
 

ougoah

Brigadier
Registered Member
lol, software really shouldn't take decades to develop. If you are taking that long, then you need to hire new developers. It is what it is. As I said in the IC thread, software really shouldn't be all that hard. It may be hard to perfect, but you can have good enough software for much less development time. Just take a look at Microsoft suite. Microsoft has been working on it for 30 years, have things really improved that much since early 2000s? Not for the average user.

Sorry I mean decades to refine and continuously develop to a point that it is similarly effective. China's first attempt at a CATIA like software wouldn't be anywhere close to as capable as CATIA from Dassault. It would take decades to continuously develop and refine and to build up its functions.

I mean Autodesk's first CAD version isn't going to be anything comparable to the most current one.
 

Andy1974

Senior Member
Registered Member
lol, software really shouldn't take decades to develop. If you are taking that long, then you need to hire new developers. It is what it is. As I said in the IC thread, software really shouldn't be all that hard. It may be hard to perfect, but you can have good enough software for much less development time. Just take a look at Microsoft suite. Microsoft has been working on it for 30 years, have things really improved that much since early 2000s? Not for the average user.
If the software is simulating physical processes that you are not sure how to simulate it’s a basic science problem, not just as software problem.
 

latenlazy

Brigadier
It's not difficult to imagine that Chinese academies and research centres indeed use a lot of American developed softwares. Even in less specialist fields, China has a lot of dependence on American software from various CAD stuff to even word processing and Excel.

This isn't particularly an issue since these do indeed count as having better "technical foundations". It costs decades and billions to develop this stuff and the Americans have began their journey to technical dominance since day 1 of every technological revolution of the 20th century. It isn't a weakness per se but a dependence on it and a total absence of domestic equivalents that are similarly effective, is a weakness that would take a lot of time to resolve unless teams are able to essentially create a 1:1 Chinese replication of the various software and then build on that.

The issue here is there just isn't the same level of market forces working to make this a reality for every field and every piece of software. We have Chinese CAD and equivalents for mainstream stuff but highly specialised ones remain a question. Maybe projects for CAS and gov institutions because there is close to zero monetary return from market forces. Engineers and developers will get paid but they won't be able to sell it to state owned aerospace organisations in the same way American ones would sell to LockMart etc.

For the time being, the current solutions are clearly fine and works well. US can't exactly sanction it since there are copies of the software, perhaps even as far as being domesticated entirely. The potential issue is the slower rate of progress as there isn't a mechanism for incentivising and building a strong foundation of domestic equivalents that continue working on better ones.

Then again China's technical talents are pretty much being used to capacity and spread out. Maybe incentivising people toward these directions is something that's already been happening. After all, Chinese software talent seem to be more focused on social application software. Does China even have a Matlab equivalent yet?
I think you're overstating the issue. Building equivalent software is a *pain* to do, not a *challenge*.
 

gelgoog

Brigadier
Registered Member
Russia had hypersonic wind tunnels for longer than China had and the US still has none basically.
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And like I said elsewhere, Russia does have their own software, they use KOMPAS-3D instead of CATIA.

I am fairly sure China should have at least their own simulation software, what else would they run on their compute clusters, but that is likely government made and under lock and key.
 
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birdlikefood

Junior Member
Registered Member
The ability of industrial software and the commercialization competitiveness of industrial software are two different things. China's performance in the latter is not satisfactory, but for the former, I believe that China has enough high-cost, non-open source, distributed software to maintain its basic scientific research capabilities, although these basic capabilities may not be able to be used on a large scale Production of consumer goods.

You know, even in the 1960s and 1970s, when there was nearly no graphical interface, the predecessors of the finite element analysis (FEA) software NASTRAN and the multi-body dynamics (MBD) software ADAMS were widely used in various simulations of the Apollo program. Achieving a basic level of distributed functionality is not difficult for China.

Although in the field of commercialized software such as EDA, which is highly dependent on a huge electronic process database, chip design library, and patent barriers, China still needs to go a long way.
 
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