Zack,

Realism for us modelers i'm afraid is carting enough fuel around to give us a decent flight time without takeoff wing loadings measured in tons per Sq inch.. and fuselages that are not one huge fuel tank...

In a jet without an afterburner the combustor is positioned, between the compressor and the turbine, simple but it's operating point is characterized by low mach numbers and high cycle pressures...still simple enough..

If more thrust is required there are two ways you can go about this..

Scale up the whole engine, however this has the penalty of lugging a bloody great engine around with you all the time..

Or..

Put an afterburner on the back of it [:@]

This is a low pressure combustion system which puts additional heat into the flow and provides a thrust boost Proportional to the square root of the temperature change...i.e you have to chuck bucketful's more fuel in.

Afterburners run at relatively low pressure conditions and hence are thermodynamically inefficient so the resultant specific fuel consumption is very poor.

Also from a technology point of view its a challenge to burn under these relatively high mach number / Low pressure conditions.

Afterburners might look and sound sexy but are for us modelers are impractical...a bit like Women