Originally Posted by Maxor

One we know nothing about?

Once you have your hands on two or 3 airframes you can take them apart and know pretty well how to duplicate them unless you are more than 3 or 4 generations behind the tech that exists as you are taking it apart. If you are even close to building something comparable you get to skip the R&D phase in reverse engineering (saving millions) if you can't figure out how it works by disasembly then you aren't capable of building soemthing comparable.


Then again I suppose I can understand the worry of not being able to reverse engeneer something when it took more than 20 years to get the LCA operational when you had Flankers and floggers for a significant portion of that time. 20 years isn't that bad if you are starting to dvelop an airplane of that generation for the first time but if you are operating other planes of that generation and have full tech transfer even as a new airframe the development time shouldn't be that long. I'm curious to see how much longer the russian indian military co-operation continues with china helping pakistan more and more and the US wanting a larger role with russian equipment becoming more dated on many fronts.