In this short essay, we want to give a general understanding of the nature of the development of heat engines in recent years, the methods used to reduce heat consumption in them and the results achieved in this direction in recent times. We limit our task to just a general description of this problem, since a detailed presentation of the current state and successes achieved in each category of engines would require a number of extensive works. We hope that in its present form our work can be of some interest to a wide circle of Russian technicians and, perhaps, even serve as a reason for the appearance of more detailed and special works.