RE: Best American Fighter?

Guys,
I would think that the laws of physics apply to fighters as well as anything else and I will generalize, not attaching names at all.

An object travelling at a certain speed in a certain direction will keep on doing so until a force is applied to change things. The heavier and bigger the object is, the higher the force must be.
This dictates that the manoeuvrability of a fighter is largely decided by its weight and size. The more light weight and smaller the fighter is the more manoeuvrable it is. The inherent inertia due to weight and, moment of inertia due to size, is the cause of the general difference between the smaller ones and the bigger ones.
Inherent energy, however, is also a parameter to consider. The higher static energy of a higher weight fighter gives better acceleration in a dive when the static energy is converted to kinetic energy. The other way around the high kinetic energy at high speed gives a high weight fighter a better zoom climb.

Then there are different airfoils. All airfoils are laminar flow, at least to some extent. When certain airfoils became known as laminar flow, they were optimized for low drag within a small range of angle of attack, sometimes known as the laminar bucket. This means that the laminar flow wings give the fighter low drag during cruising and in consequence higher speed. When the angle of attack is increased, either through climbing or turning, the drag increase of the laminar flow airfoils is much more dramatic and they bleed energy at a higher rate than the “old” airfoils.

I think it would be fair to conclude that a fighter designed with fighter bomber qualities in mind became heavier and larger, and is not as good an interceptor fighter as those designed for that role only. The other way around, converting an interceptor fighter to a fighter bomber was not a good idea either, it was too small to take the additional load.

The design of an aircraft is always a compromise to reach a sensible solution to suite the purpose.
Finally, aircraft have one thing in common with women, they are both compromizes and if you really do love them, then they are the best!?

Regards,
Christer