Don’t underestimate the luxury of room to grow. The biggest advantage over M53 is the reduced need to reinvent the fuselage as the intake is configurable on F.1 which reduces some pain in the exercise. F.1M53 was not just an F.1 with an M53. The work did in the end make M2000 less difficult to develop.

What is most intriguing about an F.1″EJ” is how well the existing platform conforms to the EJ200 motor. Especially appealing would be the shockcone intakes that would be tuned to match the motor. High altitude and high speed performance is a strong expectation. An F.1″EJ” sporting wingtip ASRAAM, two supersonic wing tanks, and a pair of MICA are formidable. Even if you drop the MICA pair for a single Meteor, you’re talking amazing standoff potential. Magic II with MICA isn’t a dog even in 2017.

I don’t know how modern construction couldn’t improve a 1960’s design when ceramics and composites could drop weights and raise maximum pressures and temperatures to gain a modest 20% improvement on the dry thrust alone. The J85 isn’t magic.

The truth is the centrifugal turbofans are simpler and cheaper to produce at that scale. There wouldn’t be a commercial product to sell, so there is no profit in accomplishing this boost of performance. The larger engines are the market.

The funny thing is, the volume of space for a J85 used in the F-5 is actually mostly the wet section.

The technology in these arrays uses mirrors I believe, so you can pack multiple focal points in your same package. You’re trying to scan the same point in space with an array of different bandwidth spectrums. You wouldn’t want to use a traditional single purpose sensor for this when you can literally scan a 60º swath of the sky every few seconds with a moving mirror and utilize several separate sensors at once with the same mirror by splitting the image and dissecting it by spectrum.

The French sabotage of Argentina’s ordnance stocks was documented. They even gave the British kill codes for the Exocets. Amazing enough the British failure to revise their IFF patterns was the primary reason the Sheffield failed to engage the incoming missile. The missile signature was ignored because it thought it was a friendly.

PW1120 in an F.1 was never likely. J79 would have been cool in one. M88 is a slimmed F.1 always sounded good to me. Too bad EJ200 wasn’t an option. Spain might have been interested much more so than an M88-powered F.1 rebuild. On the other hand, an F404-powered F.1 may have made better sense to Spain.

I’m pretty sure it was 19 frames when you included the partially assembly frames in Crimea.

The rear CFT mounts carry smart munitions where most F-15’s cannot.

You described an AJS 37, which was developed in the 90’s. I’m pretty sure that would be like comparing apples and oranges. You may as well compare the R77-equipped MLD prototype versus AJS 37. Both were more or less paper planes.

They existed in same time period, but pretty sure MLA was using anemic N003 radar. MLD was superior to Viggen, but not MLA.