I'm afraid you've likely lost most of the readers in all that insinuation, hinting and jogging peoples brains, tenderly though it may have been
I know it must have been mentioned in the thread somewhere, but at this stage does it really matter if Turkey has a domestic engine for our jets, or is everything about the design and making it fly with any engine ?
Hürkus is flying, but do we have a any flying around with domestic engine ?
Propulsion (of any nature) is tough nut to crack, and those that have cracked it the most are in position to know it best. This difficulty scales the most in gas turbines given their extremely high power/weight and RnD intensity.
They (relative tech fountainheads) will thus leverage it against you wherever possible (either simple market price + financial bargaining power or sensitive withholding at worst).
In the transition period of the cold war end to post cold war (90s and early 2000s)....2 out of 3 things the US hit India on (the most impactful) were propulsion related: Cryogenic rocketry (w.r.t how they squeezed Yeltsin + vulnerable 90s Russia on this) and also GE f404 engine for LCA project (which would later become tejas).
Both set back larger ecosystems by 10 years at least....still being felt in India. Most outside India do not understand just how cautious India proceeds with US relationship on certain key areas as result....things are generally referenced with France and Israel first these days as India has better bargaining power with them developed.
But critical provider sanction (or sanction potential) has no easy way but to take it on chin, find+develop alternatives as best as possible and backwork to make things inhouse as much as possible...so your own autarky and negotiation power (in any future tech bargaining) is improved.
In India's case the whole thing (with US) cascaded from autarky position in cold war era and consequent nuclear weapons and missile delivery programs to begin with.
This is not forgotten, US simply fed economically into PRC into the interim and one fine day see it as frankenstein now...so they are back in more positive relationship mode with us. But we are bitten once, even twice on many things...and will hedge with others....and we are in position to do so reasonably more than ever now.
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Let me bring this back to TFX....and programs of highest nature for any country (5th gen, propulsion, sensors etc)
Turkey simply has to follow same process, backwork as much as possible to fill out its cards in its deck....with enough A K Q J.
The more of those you have, the more "heavy" your deck will be with time...the better you can play.
You can make the design able to fly "with any engine" in jet engine realm only so much.
At some point you have to pick something and you do detailed design for it and do design freeze to then develop and mature next phases.
The engine provider (if foreign and not close/allied/strategic political partnership) then essentially has your sensitive parts in vice grip somewhat...as they know you will layer over phases (based on picked engine) and their sanction on such engine at later stage really throws massive spanner in works.
That is precisely what happened with India 98 nuclear tests and F404 for LCA. There was all kind of clauses in who's IP belongs to who in the end (with GE essentially having final say on it).....offices (Indian engineers were at) were completely closed off leaving even their logbooks, work notes and everything else (that was their engg + creative process) inside.
That is how it can work with these things in the end if you are not careful or simply have little choice w.r.t priorities and decisions in strategic sphere.
It is imperative for
....or any developing country in general that wants to grow and have strategic weight in world long term for its security, best realised + optimised power level and overall bargaining power.... to:
A) Make do and play smart now on tech supply chain and tech gestation
B) Pick and prioritise strategic things well and develop as much as it can in the near and mid term.
Always assume the world will turn colder and lonelier in future....i.e plan for worst case scenarios as the default.
Doing so that way....any Warmth + friendship you do actually materialise with others will just be accounted for easily (and you are in control of the relationship from your end) ...i.e a welcome extra on top...but you are not reliant on it being that way.
I think the lone wolf mythos fits quite well in the end.
How much of it actually is done and is successful on these fronts ....its case of waiting 10, 20 years or more sometimes to see what is realised. That is the nature of the beast.
