I’m an aviation nut but for the love of me I can’t find an explanation that makes sense to me
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All engines need to compress the air before burning the fuel in it to generate power. Turbojets use a mechanical compressor to do that powered by a mechanical turbine after the combustion. The disadvantage of this is a lot of moving parts and complexity, but the advantage is it can create thrust while sitting still, so an airplane can get moving and take off with it.
Ramjets use the velocity of incoming air and some clever geometry to get the compression with no moving parts. This makes them much simpler, but they can only generate thrust at relatively high velocity, so you need some other way to get a vehicle with one going. And due to using clever aerodynamics and geometry, they don’t like supersonic air coming in, so they may need other clever things to slow the air down (which turbojets need as well). Which also means they may stop working at significantly supersonic speeds.
Scramjet means Supersonic combustion ramjet. It’s a ramjet with somewhat different clever geometry meant to do the same thing while the whole air stream flowing through it continues to go at supersonic speeds. Just the thing if you want to generate thrust with an air-breathing engine at higher Mach numbers. But again you’d need some other engine to get the vehicle well into the supersonic speed range before it started working.
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