- "Have you seen how big the steam turbine is?" If your intuition was correct, I think we'd see a trend towards much smaller steam turbines with fewer stages.

- "Have you seen how big the steam turbine is?" If your intuition was correct, I think we'd see a trend towards much smaller steam turbines with fewer stages. It's a deliberate choice to engineer them at the size scale they are: the marginal efficiency gains from largest [0], lowest-pressure stages has to justify their cost. [0] https://power.mhi.com/products/steamturbines/lineup/thermal-power/1200 https://power.mhi.com/products/steamturbines/lineup/thermal-... (diagram showing relative sizes of HP / IP / LP turbine stages)