The mass budget tells the story, but so does the heat budget. A rocket engine is a controlled, contained explosion, and the limiting engineering problem is frequently not how much thrust you can make but how you keep the chamber and nozzle from being destroyed by their own combustion. Cooling is where elegant designs go to die.
The grant US10738739B2 (inventor Patrick Bahn), classified across F02K 9 propulsion subclasses and B64G 1/002, describes an integrated rocket-engine system. Its companion grant US10844808B2, "Rocket engine systems with an independently regulated cooling system," makes the priority explicit: cooling is treated as a first-class, separately controllable subsystem rather than an afterthought.
Why decouple the cooling control? Because an engine that throttles, restarts, or runs across a range of conditions sees its thermal load change with it. A cooling system you can regulate independently of the main propellant flow gives you margin, and margin is what lets an engine survive the off-nominal moments that destroy rigid designs.
Read the two filings together and the philosophy is clear: simplicity and serviceability over maximal performance. This is the engineering posture of a builder optimizing for cost and reuse rather than for a single record-setting firing, the posture that, scaled up, made reusable launch economically interesting.
The honest limit is that a patent on an engine architecture is not a hot-fire test. It describes how the designer intends to manage the heat; the test stand decides whether the intent holds at full duration and full thrust. The claim is the hypothesis, not the result.