The F313 may very well be a joke, but it could be a start. I have to give credit to the Iranian aerospace industry for keeping those tomcats flying after decades of embargo.

If a new build F-14 shows up I will agree with you but other wise, they amount to a dead-end street.

I believe the Nike Zeus had a neutron bomb warhead.

Both the Nike Hercules and Zeus were capable of actually hitting a missile but nuclear warheads used against aircraft were designed to neutralize the bombs carried by the enemy aircraft, so close was good enough.

The emp from from the Nike missile was strong enough to cause serious problems forty some years ago, pre-digital, nowadays it would be fatal to some systems and cripple for a long time most others.

A B-70 could have kept on flying if the blast was too far away to knock it down but many of todays newest aircraft would fall like mosquitos in a Black-Flag fog.

Bad Grandpa– actually very good in a odd way.

As many hundreds of hours of Python I watched and loved, I would rather like to see the return of Fawlty Towers.

That had nothing to do with the engine when it comes to top-speed. Higher installed thrust gives just a better accelleration in that case. Similar thing with the F-14D. Here the limit is forced by the fixed inlet and by the former F-102 it was the missing coke-shape of the fuselage.

The Deuce had a coke bottle shape, added at the cost of what today would be hundreds of millions of dollars, if not billions.
An entire assembly line was gutted and redone when they learned the Deuce, as was already contracted, would not go supersonic.
You tell the pilots they were wrong, do not tell me.

Read the history of Convair and the Delta Dagger and Dart.

As I said the Deuce was designed for the J75 from the start, this is from Air Force personnel (mechanics) I spoke with.
Each one was adapted to take the J57. It would have taken minimal work to, literally, slide a J75 in.
You have to read how the U.S. aviation military complex worked back then to see why it never got its intended engine.

R. Strange McNamara being a major reason.

I understand as of the mid 1990s and introduction of AMRAAM, the mig-25/31 was certainly completely outdated but in the late 70s and 80s is a different scenario.

The Mig 31 is a different beast from the Mig 25.

It can do what the ADC interceptors could do, talk to people and get radar lock information from a long ways away.
The Falcons system used by ADC interceptors if jammed by incoming aircraft, would lock onto the jamming system.
Kind of damned if you do and damned if you do not.

For the nuke armed Deuce, it was hard to miss.

The Mig 25 as far as I know did not have long range communications and radar ability.

I didnt know about the fixed ramps. At an airshow in Omaha, an older f-14 was on display. Looking in the intakes, the aircraft there for some reason has mach numbers painted in the intakes. There were scrub marks that showed that the ramps went above mach 2.4.

There are top speeds that are generally operational highs but there are also top speeds that are when the crap hits the fan time to boogie.

The latter are limited generally governed by how much oomph the engine has due to thrust, or inlet limitations, or heat limitations of air frame.

I do not want to try to plow through the ten pages here so:

Is the Russian Air Force working on a long range strategic bomber to supplement/replace the Tu-160 or not?

An article in a another thread said the U.S. Air Force gent in charge of their implied he wants a functional bomb truck rather than a high-tech white elelphant.