Hacker News Reader

ok maybe complicated is the wrong word, but my understanding is that full-flow staged combustion was rated as very hard to develop verging on impossible a decade or two ago

https://everydayastronaut.com/raptor-engine/

https://hackaday.com/2019/02/13/the-impossible-tech-behind-s...

Complicated can be more than physical complication. I understand (though I could be wrong) that these engines have a much more finicky timing sequence for things like startup than other engine types. I think calling that sort of thing a complication fair.

Here's a video of Elon explaining the Raptor engine design, and comparing Raptor 1 and Raptor 2 (Raptor 2 is much simpler): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7MQb9Y4FAE

To be fair at least one of the intermediate raptors was quite complicated, gp's info might just be out of date