Comment by jessriedel

Perpetual motion machines are disfavored because they break a law of physics, not merely because they involve a stack of complicated mechanisms, each of which fixes a problem introduced by the mechanism below. If you've ever had a complicated medical problem, you know that very often you get drug A to counteract side effects of drug B, which was used treat an infection caused by procedure C which was a necessary precaution before performing treatment D to treat the underlying illness. Yes, sometimes such complicated mechanisms are obfuscating a doomed process, but other times engineering is just complicated. The Saturn V had a lot of interdependent parts too...