The Ramjet

[Jay_n1]

Say does anyone have a clip of part 2 of Goliath where Machel makes the Ramjet out of KITT's Turbo thrusters? I would love to see it..

[J-Knight]

Season 2

[Jay_n1]

Oh I did meant on Youtube or something..

[Akaihiryuu]

I liked the episode, but the whole "ramjet" thing was really bad technobabble. It's obvious that they didn't know what a ramjet is or how it actually works. All a ramjet is, is a regular turbojet with the compressor removed from the front. The compressor is needed at lower speeds to produce enough pressure for the engine to operate, however at higher speeds (>Mach 2), there is enough pressure produced by the airflow alone, and the compressor just starts to get in the way. A ramjet would not produce *any* thrust whatsoever below half the speed of sound (which at ground level is around 375mph), and they produce very little thrust until around Mach 1 (around 750mph at ground level). In that part of the episode, Michael states that KITT's "turbine blades are shot", and yet he's looking at stuff under the hood. In a gas turbine engine, the turbine is inside the engine *behind* the combustion chamber. The combustion chamber produces very fast moving hot gasses which drive the turbine, which is basically a high tech fast moving windmill (to put it simply)...the rotation created by the turbine is used to power the compressor at the front of the engine (this is why gas turbines have to be started with an external electric motor). I'm assuming by the way KITT was depicted, that he actually used a gas turbine and not a turbojet. The M1 Abrams tank is powered by a gas turbine (think a turbojet that is optimized to collect most of the thrust into the turbine rather than shooting it out the back), while a turbojet is designed to extract only enough to run the compressor and a little extra to generate electrical power, while putting out most of the energy as thrust. Gas turbines are extremely inefficient in ground vehicles...the reason it's used in tanks is because of its extremely good power to weight ratio. KITT wouldn't be useable on the street with that much thrust, he'd be tossing cars behind him like toys. Also, there's no way KITT would get 100 mpg with a gas turbine...he'd be lucky to get 1 mpg with that kind of powerplant. Here are some nifty animations that show how these engines work: http://www.keveney.com/jets.html

And some info on both gas turbines and ramjets: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_turbine
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramjet

[FuzzieDice]

Yeah, it is rather inaccurate. In fact, in the K.I.T.T. Kit, they said the engine was a turboject with modified afterburners. Whatever the hell that is! LOL!

And in one episode, KITT implies (doesn't say right out) that he could get 300 mpg. I mean... he says that 300 mpg is "beautiful" to him along with silicon chips.

Obviously in real life an impossibility. But then so is/was KITT as a whole at that time (though they are getting closer these days).

[cloudkitt]

Or that fact that he sasy 300mpg is beautiful to him is because he can't do it. hahah

I seemed to remembered seeing 200mpg on his dash somewhere....

[FuzzieDice]

Or was that 200 mph? His speed?

[Akaihiryuu]

Actually, Chrysler put out several turbine-powered cars in the late 50's/early 60's. I think they were able to achieve 18mpg with a couple of them (actually not all that bad considering the time period...piston engines of the time weren't much more efficient). They overcame most of the turbine engine related difficulties in a car (high exhaust temperatures/poor response time/poor fuel economy) toward the end of the program...but the US govt basically shut down the program by imposing an unreasonable import duty (probably at the behest of oil companies, as these turbine cars could run on a variety of different fuels, including vegetable oil, without modification...lots of conspiracy theories abound over this). Several of the cars still exist and operate. One thing that a lot of people of the time had issues with was they were used to the V8 engine rumble...while these sounded like vacuum cleaners (hehe, sounds familiar...at least for the first season, later on they skimped on the effects and you could hear a regular V8 when KITT moved). This proves that turbine engines in cars are conceivable...but there's no way they'd ever have the efficiency that KITT was claimed to have (performance is possible, but it'd definitely not be very efficient).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrysler_Turbine_Car