This includes FIGHTERS like the F-35…

Try to stay serious: the “F” doesn’t tell mission. Otherwise F-105, F-111 or F-117 must have been great fighters. Or the F-15E.
I don’t know why the USAF abandoned the “A”.

Smaller fighters tend to be LESS powerful fighters….

If being small made for the ‘best’ fighter, the F-15, Su-27 & F-22 would never have existed & fighters like the Mig-21 & F-5 would be dominating the world.

Wrong. Learn some aviation basics. Don’t be reluctant to learn!

The F-15A couldn’t establish a substantial positive kill ratio over the F-5E.
You forgot that MiG-21 and F-5 were conceived in the 1950s, with the -21 being intended as supersonic point defence interceptor with an engine shortly ahead of the MiG-15s gas guzzler. The F-15, Su-27 and F-22 were designed with combat performance in mind, with technology available 2 to 3 generations ahead. If MiG had an engine available like the AL-31 in 1956, the MiG-21 would outclass every Suchoi 27.
Your comparison is like pitching a 1958 VW Beetle versus a 1995 Golf III, and claiming that heavier cars are more fuel efficient.

600nm

The F-16C will not make 600nm.

And if said fighter were capable of carrying said fuel internally the aerodynamic drag would be significantly less.

In cruise to the combat. In combat the “internal only” fighter carries more dead weight and volume (try to understand transonic drag!!!).
For many missions the external tanks have the advantage that aircraft can rapidly transit to best combat weight. If the F-16 is on a CAP mission with 3 big cans (which makes it more sluggish than an A380), it can transit into a nimble dogfighter with the movement of a fingertip.
Fuel efficiency is no consideration in military operations, as long as combat requirements can be achieved.

Also keep in mind that if a fighter burns 5,000 lbs of fuel it is 5,000 lbs lighter reguardless of whether that 5,000 lbs of fuel was carried internally of externally. Although 5,000 lbs of internal fuel is not required to fly the same distance/time as 5,000 lbs of external fuel…

It can only tell you, that you use very simple logic, and therefore apparently do not understand the matter entirely. There is much more to the topic, and it is dependent on many aspects (cruise Mach number, altitude profile, engine setting, combat load, mission requirements).
If we talk about about a simple flight from A to B with highest efficiency, yes, a clean design is the best (see A380). If we talk a supersonic air combat aircraft, the things are different. Try to understand and do not fall back to layman’s logic!

Coming from a city slicker, who can’t appriciate wonderfull nature:)

Try to find a decent camping place on that island.
All swamp, no trees. The nature there (in northern Norway) is wonderful, but not on that particular island.
They have quite acceptable sperm whales around.

I’ve often wondered what the effect of a Blackjack doing an East Coast run to Cuba would be if it did part of it’s flight at Mach 1.8 or something.

For a Tu-160 to get to Cuba from Russian soil forbids any use of the supersonic capability. Like the B-1B, that is a dash capability mainly.

For Norway the thing is easy as valuable “strike-worthy” targets are few and widely spaced. The Russians would never bomb some random village but concentrate on the air bases, which pose a high threat to their shipping.

Therefore, if you live in Andenes on Andöy, you might consider getting yourself a nice summer residence elsewhere for the time, preferably with minimum distance to next air base being destructive radius of 100kt nuclear warhead plus the CEP of a Russian missile.
You should take the distiller with you.
Andöy is a crappy piece of swamp anyways.

Let me summarise all this lift/drag internal/external fuel stuff.

Carrying more fuel internally increases drag, both because of the extra weight of the fuel needing more lift & the extra drag of the larger fueselage needed to carry the fuel. There will also be some extra structural weight, increasing drag a little more.

Carrying fuel externally also increases drag. The weight-induced extra drag is about the same, but the drag of external tanks is even more than the fatter fuselage needed to carry it internally. It is therefore less efficient than carrying all fuel internally, for the same fuel load.

However, once external tanks are empty, they can be dropped. If this is done, then the drag of the aircraft carrying external tanks drops considerably. An aircraft carrying all its fuel internally still has the extra structural weight & fat fuselage, so is now at a disadvantage in fuel efficiency.

In real combat operations, external tanks will be dropped when empty.

Therefore, one can not assume that internal fuel carriage is more efficient overall than external. One has to perform careful calculations to discover whether it is or not, for any given mission profile.

Similar considerations apply to the fuel efficiency of internal & external carriage of weapons. An internal weapons bay has aerodynamic & structure weight penalties to offset against the drag of externally carried weapons.

The only indisputable advantage of internal carriage is in radar cross section.

Is that a reasonable summation?

See it this way: most fighters are designed for air combat. That is the whole aerodynamics are designed to meet ambitious combat performance targets. In case of the F-16 that is the lift over drag at multiples of 1G, supersonic drag (at maneuvering!). These whole requirements lead to a huge level of “overkill” for the 1G cruise. While a B777 cruises at 80-90% available power at altitude, an F-16 cruises at less than 50% (if we look at Maximum Power).
The usage of a drop tank means a less efficient cruise, which doesn’t matter that much as – as I said – I have surplus performance. On the other hand, when I go into combat, the dropped tank allows me design a smaller more powerful fighter. That’s the whole point.

One thing (and I know all the self claimed experts and Flanker-lovers will misunderstand me on purpose): one should look at fighters, not at fighter-bombers. Using an F-16C to haul two 2000lbs 400nm (the F-35A primary mission) is gross misuse of the airframe, but is done due to other considerations. If General Dynamics was given the specifications of building a bomber they wouldn’t have come around with the YF-16. You can make most fighters to fairly effective bombers (as the F-16), but you cannot make bombers to fighters.

If we look at a modern TF-equipped fighter, about 20% of the external fuel is eaten up by aerodynamic drag, while another 20% is due to additional lift induced drag (due to weight). Problem is that most people never looked at the numbers, as they are not spoon-feed via Wikipedia but require serious investigation. Now, taking commonplace knowledge to judge about the usefulness of a particular design, that was made by professional engineers with years of experience, is a bit odd.

To get a first hand idea of that is. Do use the Microsoft Flight Simulator and fly a Jet at constant power to height and watch the fuel-flow.

But be careful as sometimes the used models, especially for the engine, are not that bright.

I would like to be able to get a general idea on time and range for an aircraft flying at max dry thrust speed, without making it too complicated and time consuming.
Assuming all engines of similar vintage will behave similar at a given altitude, but unfortunately not at different speeds, could it be said that an engine burn X% less at 40.000 ft vs sea level, and if so, what would you estimate X to be ? (max dry thrust)

ed. a very rough estimation is just fine, i’m looking for a general idea only

Multiply the thrust from Wikipedia with squareroot of the density ratio (that is density at altitude divided by density at sea level, you’ll should find that somewhere in the net, too). As long as we are talking subsonic, the thrust at M0.8 is roughly the same a M0.
Add 20%ish to the given SFC.
Take about 20% of the fuel load for take-off, climb, reserve, and use the remaining 80% as cruise fuel (and in turn do not credit distance for climb and descent).
Finally assume a 85% thrust setting.

Fighter has 3.5t internal fuel, 10000lbs reference dry thrust, SFC of 0.8.
Cruise fuel: 2.8t
Density at 30k: .458
sqrt(rho/rho0) = .61
10000lbs*(1.2*0.8)*.61*.85 = 5000 lbs/hr
Makes a cruise time of 1.23hr
At M0.8 that is a TAS of 870 km/hr and by that a distance of roughly 1000km.

Above numbers are a very rough F-16 (numbers from memory).
When you do that for several aircraft, you’ll see that finally the fuel ratio is of importance.
We’ll disregarded actual drag and stuff, and just assumed a standard throttle set.
Many shortcomings, but for starters this method is more fruit carrying than guessing from the internal fuel to the range, as Scooter does.

EDIT:
Forget the squareroot of density ratio and take it right away.
The squareroot produces too much thrust.
Since computers do such stuff for me I forget the basics.

Correct. The Q at low altitude produces more heat than traditional airplane materials can withstand.

No. Not a problem on the deck.