Experienced services accumulate design rules that practitioners treat as obvious and therefore may never record in accessible form. The Royal Navy's historically understood but poorly documented standard quantities of rope illustrate the problem. A carrier-aircraft designer faces the same kind of tacit choice when deciding how much shock isolation a radar needs and how that mounting will affect its behavior in flight. China could acquire prototypes and published specifications, but only repeated design, landing, maintenance, and failure experience could create this institutional memory.
Notable Point · 36:09-38:49
Tacit knowledge hidden inside carrier-aircraft engineering
Carrier-aircraft design depends on unwritten institutional knowledge about shock, vibration, and component behavior that cannot be obtained from plans alone.