Chinese has been making gas turbine more than a decade and our destroyer equipped with them has no issue so far. We didn't replace destroyer like RN type 45 during any of our anti piracy trip or overseas deployment halfway. It proves it relaibility.Nothing to do with the value of lives and everything to do with the Total cost of Ownership which includes initial procurement costs, costs to operate and cost to maintain and replacement costs, given shorter service lives etc. Right now, and i suspect for quite some time, chinese engines will have much higher TCO costs than western engines and even Russian engines.
Jet engines are hard to make - ask the russians - they have been doing it longer than china but they are having issues with their engines(eg AL-31's )...
If u are asking why suddenly the topic changes to ship gas turbine is becos naval warship gas turbine derived from turbofan. And they are equally hard to make. Even the Russian hasn't really master the naval gas turbine. Big reason why Russian naval modernization is delayed. I highly doubt Chinese aero engine are behind Russian, in fact our benchmark set for our aero engine are much higher than Russian.
A very big reason why Chinese continue used large number of AL-31 engine and only until recently we switches to Chinese one is becos we signed a mega deal for supply of 1000 AL-31 engines in 2000s which Russian insist to lock on to their profit. They know Chinese going to use domestic aero engine soon but not willing to supply further unless Chinese committed this amount.
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