>>12857112The N1 first stage is the only thing I can think of that would have the ability to actually lift off the ground with a fully loaded Starship on top, I think.
The N1 first stage produces only about 60% of the thrust of the Super Heavy Booster, but it also masses much less (for reference, the propellant of the Booster alone has a mass about 1.22 times greater than the all-up mass of the entire N1 rocket). Since most of the mass of SSH is in the Booster, swapping it out for a much less powerful but also much less massive N1 first stage could possibly break even and allow the weird franken-stack rocket to lift off.
As for reaching orbit, I'm not sure. I would say that in order to have any hope of getting to orbit the Starship would need to carry no payload and be very careful about managing gravity losses during ascent, because it's not going to get much delta V out of that N1 stage, which was meant to stage off pretty low and slow even when pushing the much lighter subsequent stages of the vanilla N1 rocket.
So to answer your question, uh, no, I guess. The second most powerful rocket stage ever built could not get Starship even close to its payload performance goals.
