If you build the engine but don't finish the stand you will have learnt
a lot about building a rocket engine.
If you build the stand but don't finish the engine well, you built a
stand I guess.
If the engine you manage to build is different from the one you started
out trying to build the stand may not be suitable or may be a waste.
My vote for starting out is build the engine first. There's also going
to be long periods of dead time. If the engine is a reasonable first
engine a quick stand shouldn't be much more than
an I beam and some concrete in terms of stand specific build. (tanks and
valves can move)
On 2021-03-26 8:48 am, Jonathan Adams wrote:
For those of you with experience building and firing a liquid-propellant rocket engine, plus the test stand and tanks, which should come first in design and construction - the engine or the stand?
Construction, and spending the money to truly get started seems like the point of no return (without losing money, at least), so my team wanted to do this bit right.
The engine seems like it would be the hard part, so building that first would get it out of the way. Beyond that, the test stand should be much easier to build (or so we think).
But then there's also the issue that building the engine before you have a test stand (that you know can support it) might be putting the cart before the horse. It could also lead to issues where we find that the test stand can't match what we designed the engine for.
If anyone can tell me from experience what the best way to go about this would be, my team and I would greatly appreciate it.
Thanks.