Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The Soviets royally sucked in the computation department To add more nuance, there is an essay [1] telling the history of early maximum flow algorithms and includes this small anecdote: [An] American asked: ".. how were you able to perform such an enormous amount of computing with your weak computers" to which the Russian responded: "we used better algorithms". There is some truth to that, besides maximum flow, sim…
While not unknown in the west in the past, "better algorithms" are in a way a dying breed in aerospace - these days a student will easily have a CFD package brute force through the problem overnight and be done. My father, upon taking over his promotor's office in Warsaw Institute of Technology, found among other things a book in Russian that described analytical, symbolic methods allowing "good enough" approximated…
Re: The Entire History of Soviet Rocket Engines
#41CFD only looks like brute force when compared to purely analytical methods. In practice, you can't brute force a chaotic system as you quickly hit the wall. Anything complex pretty much requires you to get clever with simulation just like it did before computers with analytical approach, and/or rely on experimentation. It's especially true for rocket engine design; there's a reason why nobody made a practical RDE yet.