Derek Lyons wrote:

Certainly. But we weren't talking about saving money, but about
producing motors, especially large ones, in significant quantities on
a schedule. However Pat dismissed even the possibility of such a
program for the N-1 out of hand, which is incorrect and what I was
adressing.


I didn't say it was impossible to do, just that is was going to be damn
hard to do, and that it would be difficult to give each motor a decent
check-out before shipping it off the the launch site. I don't know haw
many man-hours went into each motor's construction, but it was a fairly
sophisticated design that had a better ISP than the F-1, and it sounds
like a lot of floor space and people would be needed to build them in
the numbers needed for large-scale use of the rocket.
The original plan was for variants of the N-1 using its stages in
various configurations were going to become the standard Soviet medium
and heavy lift rocket systems- there was even a ICBM variant proposed:
http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/n11gr.htm

(Pat and I were also discussing tweaking/tuning in the
name of building safe, reliable motors. Cost is somewhat less of an
issue in that instance.)


I'd be more concerned about the production rate than the cost per motor.

Pat