The russians have better rocket engines

[Simon]

I am not setting him on a pedestal in any way. I see him as a driven man that happened to live during a time that did not give a person very many options. Either be part of the rulers or be part of the downtrodden.

Times never change do they 

[rbola35618]

I posted these videos to show that there many ways to skin a cat. The Russians use what I think would be positive feedback, by reusing some of the unburned exhaust back into the chamber. This is not used in western rockets because the pressure builds up and may cause an explosion. I see it ironic that  Electrical engineers use positive feedback to make oscillators. These Russian engineers used positive feedback to increase the rocket efficiency and control the positive feedback to avoid explosions. They perfected these rockets not by using computer to design their rockets but used many iterations until they got it right.I supposed that if they had had the computers that the west has, would they have arrived to the same solution?

[Simon]

is it positive feedback ? I think it is just making the most of what you have, if you know your throwing out unburned fuel and loosing the power it makes sense to recover it, although this seems to complicate the design but then there is never free cake

[SeanB]

They were pushed to go for efficiency by orbital mechanics. Florida is pretty much on the equator, where you get a very useful gain from the surface speed of the earth, making it easier to achieve orbit. The USSR had no such luxury, they needed the extra efficiency to just make orbit. They also have a lot of territory at high latitudes, so a lot of the launches are to a polar orbit, and into an extreme elliptical one as well, so that they can get reliable coverage, although they had to have steerable antennas to track the satellites, but could get reliable comms over the whole country from a relatively low number of satellites in non geosynchronous orbits.orbits were such that they could make use of nearly 90 minutes of the satellite in a 120 minute orbit.