/sci/ - Science & Math

>>15287689
Greebles. Makes it look cooler

Could it have worked?

How does sci redesign the N1 to be flyable and not just a massive firecracker?

NASA wants to keep deveelopimg the sls. Instead of buying dozens of Falcon Heavies and assembling large things in space for lunar and beyond missions.

Can someone please explain why the SpaceX ITS with it's 42 engine first stage will work when the Soviet N-1 with it's 30 engine first stage failed miserably precisely because it had so many engines to go wrong.

>>7982804
>There is quite a difference between the plumbing needed to supply 32 Nk-33's from a single pair of tanks vs 1 RD-107/8 from a pair of tanks.
>30 Nk-33's from a single pair of tanks vs 32 combustion chambers grouped among 5 RD-107/8s from five pairs of tanks.
There isn't all that much difference. If there was some advantage to it, there's no reason, for instance, that you couldn't have grouped the 30 engines into five teams of six with one pair of main propellant lines each, and short range local distribution. Five pairs of propellant lines is certainly less complicated than five fully separate tanks, and local tank-pressure distribution to six engines would not be more complex than the RD-107/8's local distribution to 6-8 combustion chambers.

The RD-108 had to distribute not just tank-pressure, but post-turbopump, combustion-chamber-pressure propellants to eight combustion chambers, four of which gimbal! That's a complex plumbing job.

N1 was really not a fundamentally worse design than R7, but the chief designer died early in the project. The basic sketch of the rocket is sensible, but there was nobody able to handle the details on his level.

It's likely that if Korolev died in the middle of R7 development, after settling the basic layout, there would have been no Sputnik and no Soyuz, and Chelomei's hypergolic rockets (like Proton -- compare the Titan II used for Project Gemini) would have dominated the Soviet manned space program. If he had lived in good health for another ten years, the N1 would probably have worked well and been used for a Soviet manned moon landing a few years behind the Americans.

>>7673579
A lot more plumbing due to using a bunch of smaller engines instead of a couple of large ones. If I recall correctly, even a single engine failure would have caused it to spin out of control.

The N1 looks better than the R7 tbh fam.