Ninja Eagle has the inside track in this race. Don’t be surprised when it wins.

Nice angle for the C.

They haven’t abandoned nuclear rocket engines just yet.

The Tejas is practically a mid-range fighter in a small fighter footprint. It will not be especially affordable to export considering the sum already lost in development. And without an indigenous engine and with little indigenous avionics you’re relying on 3rd party support. The JF-17 again suffers lack of indigenous engine and avionics support. Same problems.

Brazil has plenty of experience with building airframes, avionics, and just about everything save for turbofans or turbojets. The AMX was a superb design and it’s not going away anytime soon. I can see absolutely no reason Brazil cannot come up with its own airframes. It would be nice to see them buy Rafale just so they get access to the M88. A lightweight fighter built around the M88 would be pretty slick. Especially if it’s design turns out to be something like the Rafale or Typhoon scaled downwards.

Can anyone imagine an F125-powered single-engined mini-Typhoon or downscaled Lavi? Small and nimble like the F-5, only built using composites and a focus on affordability. It’s not like Brazil has superpowers for neighbors.

The only re-engine job I could see possible for F-5 airframes is to pull a ‘Tigershark’ conversion to an F125-derived motor rather than an F404. The one engine could be more powerful than two J85-21’s. Then you would still want something like the Vixen 500E in the nose. Grifo is fine for its current task, so no need to change the current choice in the program. You could drop down to a single 20mm, which offhand I believe the current upgrade did. But heck, now we may want to increase the intakes, which then you have major body work. So you probably compromise with minimal changes to the body and end up less than idea airflow for the engine.

Too bad there isn’t any real alternatives out there. About the most comparable program today is the F-CK-1. You cannot supe up any trainers to perform comparably. The only trainers in the F-5’s speed class is too crude (MiG-21 and MiG-19 derivatives) or too expensive (T-50 and JL-15). The Ching Kou’s price tag isn’t looking so outrageous when you consider the current upgrade costs. If Brazil had jointly produced the Ching Kou both countries would have solved their problems together. A plane in that size range would have been better equipped to handle anything the Gripen would carry, too. Instead of trying to get ToT today they would have been looking at a new run of Ching Kou-types.

Although Franceis not in NATO they do maintain interoperability, which is the reason those citations work.

Spaceship One essentially does the same concept for the manned space-flight launch platform. I’d imagine just getting yourself up to 10 miles of altitude and using a Pegasus type of space launch vehicle gets you there with a lot less sophistication.

I cannot imagine the Mirage IIIO would have out performed the Saab Draken which was similar in layout, but enjoyed a bump in engine performance. The Mirage F1.M53 is more intriguing.