Sea Dragon - The Saturn V's big brother? 

Ah. The "so unstable that it ends up being stable" hypothesis.

This is also the basis for my dancefloor moves 😅

​@@EagerSpace​@EagerSpace actually, yes. There's a similar problem and conjecture in biology regarding large animals with long lifespans that theoretically should be entirely cancer, yet aren't. Since mammal cells are approximately the same size, or at least larger mammals are larger mostly by way of simply having more cells, the odds that any one becomes cancerous should be astronomically high in animals like whales and elephants, yet they live long lives anyway. One hypothesis is 'hypertumors' or equivalent mechanisms, where cancer feeds off of other cancer, sort of canceling it out in the end. In a similar way, the combustion chamber being quite large could in theory generate turbulent flows in a much more laminar fashion overall throughout the combustion chamber, decreasing the significance of any shocks experienced in the F-1; or to put it more simply: The so-unstable-it-becomes-stable hypothesis. I for one am also skeptical about this (among many other principles of Sea Dragon), but I don't know that it's quite "and then a miracle occurs"-levels of dismissal. The real miracle would probably be the metallurgy, manufacturing, and corrosion.. Great vid! ❤

@@EagerSpaceactually there was a separate study about how the combustion instabilities would be so big and slow due to the bell size that 60’s tech could actively cancel it out. That’s how massive this was.

Literally "that one problem is the solution"

You could fit 29 F-1 engines in that space, with no gimballing. Use the aux motors to do that for you. If you shrunk their bells to 9' in diameter, you could fit 51 of them in the first stage. But - of course - nobody would ever think of putting more than 5 engines on a first stage, much less more than 25...

​@@EagerSpace 🤣🤣🤣🤣

@@EagerSpace*laughs in starships 33 engines* 😂

​@@EagerSpace laughs in n1😂😂

@@EagerSpacehehehehehehe NK33 go BBBBRRRRRRRRRR (and raptor I guess, hell, the proposed 9 engines for Starship is an insane number of engines for an upper stage, not even mentioning the booster)

It was a ridiculous idea, but it's a fun ridiculous idea.

@@EagerSpace oh definitely, just the shear size and engineering that it would have taken to build it, alone. But had they built it and flown it, holy cow that woulda been a show! 😍

@@robdonnelly6537RIP aquatic life tho Hopefully they would’ve waited to build an artificial lake

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Tom would obviously know far more about it than I would. I'll only note that a) at the beginning of the F-1 they didn't think they would run into any significant issues with scaling and b) nobody has tried to build an engine that big since and c) the Russians went to multi-chamber engines which shows that they found the big combustion chambers problematic as well.

David Vs goliath

Took me a few minutes... www.thespacereview.com/article/4503/1

@@EagerSpace Thank You!

See: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-wEkNwcL3DoM.html It's not really very exciting IMO.

I don't know if this is tested, but if you vent a small amount of lox into the engine bell it will vaporize and that vapor will push fill the nozzle and displace the water.

@@EagerSpace Question is how deep the engines are under water. The engine is pressure feed, so the pressure of the water must be lower than the pressure of the LOX.

@@annando The rocket is 150 meters tall, and roughly 100 meters is below the surface of the water. The LOX tank is at 16 bar, but if you heat up the pressure will go up. You could also dedicate some of the liquid methane to do it. It's at 300 bar IIRC.

It would need 24 times the thrust of the SLS boosters. Seems like that would be pretty hard to fabricate and pour. They are also really dense - the propellant is about twice as dense as water - and therefore very very heavy. You would need some sort of floating platform to keep them from sinking.

@@EagerSpace Good points

Also solid rockets are not throttleable, which gives complications as you approach max q and is why they are rare to see on main stages on large rockets.

@@Quasarnova1 There is some "thrust profile" you can "program" into the fuel itself, via geometry and composition, but yeah that is another complication.

@@Quasarnova1 This isn't necessarily a dealbreaker. Saturn V, Firefly Alpha and Starship-Super Heavy all punch through Max-Q without throttling; albeit, solids tend to be rougher than liquid fuelled vehicles, so it might be a little more difficult. But as someone else pointed out, you can _kinda_ get a variable thrust output from solids by just hardcoding (hardcasting?) the preferred flight profile and make it work.

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I think we all know it would have cost overuns like every other government project *cough*SLS*cough*