Give them a chance to buy Americanized Gripens instead. We don’t need a government that is not particularly trustworthy at this stage owning such an air force in such proximity to Israel.

Are we seriously having this discussion again?

You must be referring to the F-14D -vs- F-18E/F debate that raged for like 30 pages. No, what I was asking was instead of making an F-18E/F in the same weight class as the F-18C/D, would it have been just as plausible to make the F-18E/F into the heavier footprint? You have gigantic carriers designed with the F-111 program in mind. So why not an up-engined F-18E/F?

There was an SA-12 project designed with counter awacs in mind, too. No details if it ever bore fruit.

I once saw an F-106B blast a UFO out of the sky. (Starman, 1984)

Don’t forget you are losing lift in the had turn, not gaining. Think of lift as trading thrust for the ability to stay aloft. The exchange of thrust for lift is known as your induced drag. You gain lift by increasing the induced drag and lose lift when there is no induced drag. Don’t confuse induced drag with stalling; you stall when there is too little lift to carry the weight of the aircraft but it by no means implies there is no induced drag.

You lose a proportional amount of lift doing a roll into the banked turn due to the physics of pulling your plane nose up at a slope to the horizon. The more roll the less lift. However, because as you roll the mechanical advantage is lost within the wings it takes an exponential increase in the amount of induced drag to maintain the lift necessary to prevent a stall.

The perfect velocity for the 9g turn is referred to as your corner velocity. Let’s say your aircraft is stressed for up to 9g’s. The trick to a 9g turn is one should retain altitude in the turn at a particular roll angle by maintaining the nose with the horizon. If your nose gets below the horizon then you fail to exchange thrust for lift, i.e. induced drag. If your nose gets above the horizon you bleed off excessive thrust as the plane begins to exchange thrust for lift at a greater rate.

The perfect velocity for the 9g turn is referred to as your corner velocity. At lesser velocity the aircraft will lose the ability to maintain its altitude in the amount of roll it takes to do a 9g turn and therefore the turn becomes widened and the plane enters a stall. At higher velocities the plane can not exchange its thrust for induced drag fast enough to maintain a more tight turn than its corner velocity and in that case the turn also widens. In this respect your corner velocity is within a pretty narrow margin or error.

I could be wrong but this is how it was explained to me.

If the F-4 has to sustain 3g to do Mach 2.21 then it really implies that a Foxbat with a 4g limit is not going to far surpass that record. You’d have to scale your circle accordingly so that the airframe did not enter into an unsafe stress range.

F-20’s low cost centered around Northrop’s pioneering bleeding edge maintenance techniques. It may not have outperformed the F-16 but it did sustain a higher number of sorties over a given time period. What they did then is pretty standard across the market today.

When flying head on at a target you would suspect a missile launch at 100 miles away will impact at only 25 miles out from the launch aircraft. The displacement from the actual aircraft and its launch point are two very different ideas. For one making some many distinctions in his last post we should assume you knew this.