ramjet

Transforms from plane to robot and back!

DECEPTICON: RAMJET

FUNCTION: WARRIOR
"If it flies, crash it!"

Mid-air collisions are his specialty. It makes little difference if the target is an opponent or not, he'll crash into it just for the fun of bringing terror to the skies. These crashes can take their toll on him, particularly doing damage to his internal mechanisms. "The skies are my castle and I like to live alone", he says. His nose module can withstand the impact of three-foot thick concrete at 1500 mph, and he flies as fast as Mach 2.8 while carrying cluster bombs.

• Strength: 8
• Intelligence: 5
• Speed: 9
• Endurance: 9
• Rank: 5
• Courage: 8
• Firepower: 7
• Skill: 6

Transformers Tech Specs

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The tech spec writers decided to pun on the word "ramjet" and applied it literally to this character. A ramming jet... get it? Ha, ha, ha! Oh, how very clever. It left me rolling all the way to the LEGO aisle.

Ramjet was a second-year jet who replaced each wing/stabilizer assembly with a single stylized wing and added a larger engine underneath each tail. I guess it looked cool, although Thrust and Dirge did it better. Besides, white is a silly body color for an evil Decepticon.

Invented by Rene Lorin in 1913, ramjets are jet engines which require no moving parts, and operate at subsonic speeds (as opposed to supersonic ramjets, or scramjets). Ramjets also differ slightly from pulsejets, in that they burn fuel at a constant rate. The basic concept of the ramjet is to force air into a chamber, the shape of which is designed to achieve the appropriate compression required for operation. Because ramjets rely on this concept, they must be accellerated to roughly 400 mph before they will generate any thrust.

Airflow enters the ramjet where it is compressed, mixed with fuel, ignited and released. Because of the amount of air flowing through the jet, a special, slow-burning fuel is required to avoid the immediate extinguishing of the burn, and due to the low compression ratio at which the ramjet operates, it is very inefficient.

Variations on the ramjet concept include both liquid and solid fuel ramjets, variable geometry ramjets (which provide for a broader range of thrust, but are much, much more complicated), pulsejets, ramrockets, scramjets and a nuclear ramjet. There have even been experiments with adding ramjets to the tips of the rotors on a hellicopter, but with limited success.