Yeah, but MiG-25 could hand their missile command over to GCI forty years ago, and MiG-31 could pass it from one plane to another late in its operational prototype form. So those hurdles would have been firsts for them, not everyone.

I know this is a retread of some very old material. But does anyone know if there was ever some kind of book detailing the project?

The Novi Avion is exactly what Dassault needed for export orders. They could have offered a partnership with Alenia for a joint Italy-French version, or perhaps another partner, in order to promote two shriveling aerospace blocks. The size of radar necessary would have been right up Marconi’s alley.

Nobody knows what goes on out there.

Apparently the radio beacon in the warhead bus failed to transmit. Hard to shoot the fish in a barrel when you can’t find the water in the barrel.

If roll rate and excess energy were paramount I’d think the MiG-23 would excel in wvr. However, it’s not a good dogfighter.

More or less I did mean western hemisphere. You don’t have to wage war with western alliances (such as NATO) and the western G-20 countries to tie their hands, you merely need a human catastrophe to suck them in. The ‘feel good-do good’ers will force their hands to take action. Every little humanitarian aid program ties them down little by little to the point of being unable to react in serious matters closer to home.

WW1 and WW2 had very similar backdrops that led the allies astray. They were getting involved in their ex-colonial possessions far too much for their own good sakes. By the time they wised up to the issues closer to home they were completely engulfed in them.

People are all about global warming right now. But in the next decade we will see a pattern of cool down. With every pattern of cooling we get global patterns of famine, drought, and civil war over limited resources. People want to buy into the idea that oil is what makes countries tick, but its not the most important resource to the average human being out there. No, the average human being is busy in their day to day pursue of sating their needs for shelter, food, and clean water. Without those one will perish, hence the civil wars.

They are very large, so of course they induce drag and require additional fuel burn, but as I understand it, the pods themselves create all the electricity they require to run…

Using propellers driven by forward aircraft displacement is an external power source. It’s just not plugged in.