Derek Lyons wrote:

Nonsense. If you allow for testing/tweaking time in your
manufacturing schedule and budget, it doesn't matter if you are making
10 motors or 10,000.


Do you think you are going to have more man hours in five big motors and
their plumbing or thirty medium sized ones?
More man hours mean more possibility for mistakes. All of our manned
moon landings (Apollos 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17)
used the same number of F-1 motors as the number of NK-15's used in one
N-1 first stage.
If you have forever to make them, you can take time on each of the
motors and check it out...but the 14 N-1's the soviets had finished or
in construction meant they needed 420 motors for the first stages, and
an additional 112 modified NK-15s for the second stages. That's 532
motors total, and that is a _lot_ to build and inspect.
One thing that indicates the degree of confidence that the Soviets had
in the N-1 was that they wanted a dozen successful unmanned launches
before they were going to put a crew on it.

Pat