SV first stage had 5 engines, vs 33 on the Starship's booster. Which I think answers your question :)
I don't know about other metrics for comparing engine efficiency. But the design requirements seem quite different here - they have to be restartable (not something the F1 engines on the SV had to worry about), probably more steerable, and able to throttle down to quite low power for landing. And presumably the fact that there's so many in an array also imposes its own constraints on the design.
> > > Is 2x thrust accomplished by scaling # of engines, or are the engines 'more-thrustful' per unit because of engineering advances?
> > SV first stage had 5 engines, vs 33 on the Starship's booster. Which I think answers your question :)
> it doesnt, please eLI5
I kinda suspect bad faith/trolling, but if not... 6.5 times the number of engines for twice the thrust means that you are getting less thrust per engine.
No trolling, but one of the the things I like to promote on HN is for people to ELI5 as much as possible, given the fact that our knowledge will evaporate over time... so I want people to, as much as possible, divulge as much as one can before they kick the can...
Yah, I just though this wasn't really subject matter expertise. It's not quite ELI"5", but I thought reasoning using ratios would be universal/intuitive.
Having a whole bunch of engines means loosing a few at launch won't end in disaster. That means you can pursue more high-risk, high-performance engine designs.
