The more creativity and ingenuity you give your aliens, the less is available for your humans, generally the protagonists, which means things will end poorly for Our Heroes. … Sort of like a SCIENCE application of the Law of Conservation of Ninjutsu?

One jet is constantly open and exposed to the suction of the incoming air and suffices to furnish the gasoline required properly to carburate the air entering at small and moderate gas demands.

James Bond. At your service.

Apart from some minimal tidying up (nearly always to my questions and comments; [Greil] Marcus “talks like a book,” as folk in England used to say about eloquent persons) and one small liberty taken with sequencing to preserve chronological flow, this is exactly how the conversation went down.