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Comment by avmich | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how nobody talks about ill fate of N-1 with 30 engines on the first stage with the idea that the number of engines was the reason for breakdowns.

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N-1 steered by differential thrust, meaning every engine points directly backwards and losing one on the rim means you have to turn off another on the opposite side to compensate, and now you've lost all the margin there is in the design and quite a lot of control authority too. All SpaceX rockets steer by gimbaling engines, meaning you lose one on the rim and you just adjust the thrust vectors to compensate.

Apparently the N-1 never actually fired all 30 engines simultaneously before launch, so there was no way to detect plumbing issues.

Additionally, their control scheme was designed to shut down the engine opposite to any failed engine, meaning that they had very little engine-out margin in the inevitability of an engine failure.

All in all, we can (and have, with the Falcon Heavy) do much better.

> meaning that they had very little engine-out margin

N-1 could complete the mission with up to 4 engines turned off from the start. And I guess it it's not from the start, you could turn off even more engines and still have a successful flight.

Even though Saturn-V is heavier, N-1 has more lift-off thrust. Partially to have this kind of redundancy.

The relevant tech - computer control, metallurgy, etc. - has come a ways since the mid 1960s.

SpaceX's lots-of-engines approach has been well proven on the Falcon 9 thus far.

That's fine, but it means you can't blame the sheer number of engines on N-1 to its poor performance. There is no law which forbids launching, e.g. Soyuz with 32 working from the start chambers, or Energiya with 20 chambers, or Falcon Heavy with 27 chambers successfully. It's other reasons - maybe computer control (KORD was a complex system to create), maybe metallurgy (even though NK-33, manufactured in ~1973, manage to fly after 40+ years in storage), maybe something else.

This is just to compare optimism for heavily multi-engined BFR with suggestions that N-1 was doomed just because of the number of engines.

As I recall, nobody could stop talking about it in the weeks before the Falcon Heavy demo.

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