Full-Flow Staged Combustion Engine Cycle

Next-generation methane/LOX launch vehicles owe much of their performance not to the propellant itself but to how the engine feeds it. This simulator renders a real 3D turbomachinery schematic of a full-flow staged-combustion (FFSC) rocket engine — the cycle behind engines like Raptor and BE-4 — with animated propellant streams flowing from twin tanks through twin turbopumps into a fuel-rich and an oxidizer-rich preburner, both of which fully gasify before merging in the main chamber. Tune the propellant mixture ratio, total mass flow and the preburner turbine's temperature limit and watch chamber pressure, effective specific impulse and thrust respond through the same power-balance physics that governs a real turbopump. A one-click toggle swaps in the older gas-generator cycle, where a small slice of propellant is burned and dumped overboard unused — instantly visible as a wasted side exhaust plume and a lower achievable chamber pressure, the mechanical reason full-flow staging became the architecture of choice for reusable, high-cadence launch vehicles.