Am Mon, 20 Dec 2004 16:30:38 -0600 schrieb "Pat Flannery":

However, that was mostly a consequence of its very large combustion
chamber. When the Russians ran into similar problems, they responded
by clustering smaller chambers instead, which worked.

Right up till they got to their 30 engined N-1 Moon rocket it worked,
then it didn't work.
There is also a great deal of propellant feed plumbing weight associated
with such an approach.

[...]
Oh, I'll back Henry. In the beginning the Russians did not really
cluster large amounts of ENGINES - they clustered THRUST CHAMBERS. The
original R-7 ICBM had 'only' five engines, but 32 thrust chambers in
total. I agree your opinion, that their later approach of using 30
independent engines in the 1st stage of N1 (and not to forget the
clusters of upper stages) was deemed to fail.

cu, ZiLi aka HKZL (Heinrich Zinndorf-Linker)
--
"Abusus non tollit usum" - Latin: Abuse is no argument against proper use.

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