J-X4 "Whiplash" Turbo Ramjet Engine

The TurboJet Engine is an air-breathing engine which requires fuel from FL-T fuel tanks.

Usage

This jet burns fuel using oxygen from the atmosphere rather than drawing it from an onboard tank like a rocket engine. This is represented in-game by a much lower rate of fuel consumption, which translates to fantastic efficiency provided you are flying at less than 12km or so. Jets control a little differently to the rocket engines. The fan in front takes time to change speed, and if the throttle is too low the engine will stall. By contrast, rocket engines give an instant response to your input.

The Turbojet might not like breathing in thick atmosphere, but it's sufficiently powerful that you won't notice much improvement by using the Basic Jet Engine at low altitudes.

Currently, jets do not require you to fit air intakes to your spacecraft and function independently of whether you use a fan intake or not.

In real life, a turbojet engine's fan pulls all the air from the intake through a combustion chamber, as opposed to a turbofan in which some of the air sucked in bypasses the chamber and is shot out of the back without being burned at all. The turbojet is more efficient at high speeds and in thinner atmospheres, although turbofans are much quieter and are very efficient when moving slowly. This is why turbofans are almost exclusively fitted on airliners, and turbojets are more common on fighter planes.

Description

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A standard air breathing engine. This model utilizes an array of rotating fins to enable limited range thrust vectoring. This engine chokes in thick atmospheres and will only operate efficiently in the thinner air, due to its high performance ram air intakes. — C7 Aerospace Division

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