In article .com,
() wrote:

But in most cases the technological differences between the Soviets
and the West (different attitudes to manufacturing and maintenance
issues), and differences in measure systems (meters vs. inches) could
make it really difficult to make such aircraft flyable.

The difficulty isn't so much with "flyable", so much as manufactuable in
quantity and "maintainable". These issues could be overcome; they take
significant work, but sometimes it was easier than developing a
different aircraft. The prime example of that was the Tu-4 "Bull", which
was a copy of the B-29, based on three B-29s that landed in the far east
of the USSR in late WWII. The engines, guns and electronics were Soviet
designs, but the rest was copied. It was quicker than developing an
equivalent aircraft from scratch, and moved Soviet aircraft technology
forward quite significantly.

In the same way, they bought and copied British jet engines; they had
their own development programmes too, but the experience of
manufacturing some which had been debugged was well worthwhile.

---
John Dallman, , HTML mail is treated as probable spam.