Small, hmmm, the six was 70 feet long, the Thud was only 64 feet long.
The F-106A was built low drag and it’s maximum takeoff weight was actually quite small for its length. Its fuselage was a triangular profile along the longitudinal axis, not the square or round profiles typically used. The F100 may not have had performance equal to J75 at FL600, but it would have required far less fuel to make the initial climb to FL360.
As far as speed, if you read some of side stories involving the Six from the site dedicated to it, it was flown at speeds up to Mach 2.7 and 70,000 feet. Not dash or zoom but flown in steady state.
Now for a Gripen craft to to use the F119 it would have to gain a lot of size.
I can imagine that you understand glass front glass has its thermal limitations. Rare excursions to M2.7 are the exception, not the rule. Later designs protected the canopy from thermal issues that allowed better vision than the Convair wedged canopy. I’m not sure how one would elect to tackle these issues. But we know Northrop and Lockheed did pretty well using chines to focus much of the air friction to the panned underside, so I imagine it wasn’t impossible to tackle. But I find the idea of Mach2.7 in an operational F-106 to be far fetched.
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