Why does they insist on making her so fucking fat? She used to be so nimble and elegant. Where did it all go wrong?
>>64194700Because it turns out the fighter mafia fantasy of nible jet fighters in a tight-turning gunfight in the sky was insane delusions and planes need to do stuff. To do stuff they need stuff attached. Thus you get chubby F-16.
>>64194700It was made extremely short range in exchange for great kinematics, this is fine for the US with an airbase every 2 miles but doesn't work in countries that aren't dropping a trillion a year on the military.The F-15 is much better suited for lots of countries but was tightly export controlled for decades unlike the F-16.
>>64194700the base plane with no conformal/drop tanks has no fuel to do anything useful in a war. even on routine air patrol you'd want the extra fuel in case you're called to fight for real so you will never see them fly without drop tanks.i honestly have no idea why they were designed this way. such a plane would not even be able to reach the front line (and come back) in a war without drop tanks.
>>64194768>i honestly have no idea why they were designed this way"The USSR is going to invade West Germany and we are going to be fighting a slow retreating defence while taking massive losses" was the thinking.
>>64194776if ussr invaded west germany they were gonna bomb every airfield in the area. you're gonna want to fly out of france,uk,italy not to rely on close airfields and even if you somehow beat them and counterattack you cant reach further than the middle of poland on those ranges.lack of fuel just cripples your options in war. often indirect long fuel-costly routes are the best way to catch the enemy off guard. take the B2s as an example of the opposite they can circle the globe in any direction, cross or go around any continent and attack any place from every place (given enough air refueling) this gives them unpredictability and uncerteinty from the enemy's perspective where's low fuel f16s have very easily defined range limits,response times that you can plan around. you can design missions that put the f16s at a disadvantage just due to fuel economy (where your own planes can full-blast afterburners all day but the f16s are at the edge of their range and might be forced to put themselves in vulnerable positions just to fly back to base for fuel)being nimble isnt that important in a fighter plane it needs to go fast and go far
>>64194825At the peak of the cold war there were so many airfields and highways built as backup airfields they couldn't have hit them all.Pic related is NATO airfields in France in 1966, note they are ~100 miles apart.I agree it needed longer range, I'm >>64194754 but for the war it was designed for it would have been low cost and mass producible enough to be lost by the hundreds.
>>64194825Guess that's why the MiG-25 and MiG-23 were such success stories, right ?
>>64194842i get the idea but in air power distance is your best defense and range is your best offense. even if you have hundreds of dispersed fields with a few planes each its tougher to coordinate anything large scale when the planes barely have the range to reach the target and cant stay over it for long.>>64194847no they were shit
>>64194865They wouldn't be coordinating anything large scale, the assumption was full command decapitation.
>>64194873either way it seems retarded to design a plane around a hypothetical war over a specific tiny place with lots of air bases and even if you do assuming 'command decapitation' is also retarded. if your commanders are still around and still able to communicate with each other you want the ability to organize things like big coordinated air raids that might do things small scale air operations cant.just this year we had F15/F16 bombing targets 2000km from the airbase (hell it even happened this week). the fact that they werent designed to do that with internal fuel is a major design flaw.
>>64194700>Why does they insist on making her so fucking fat?It's just a cat girl thing, they all tend to be a bit thicc.Thicc maids outnumber athletic catwomen by 100:1.
death camps for fat womenforced labor camps for fat women enablers
>>64194935I agree, the F-16 was a great design because it was so cheap and it needed to exist because the cold war going hot would be a war of attrition but the F-15 should have been the backbone of NATO forces with the F-16 as a backup in case you start losing 10 F-15s a day and need to produce F-16s twice as fast as F-15s.
>>64194946so it was meant to be cheap 'disposable' and became the hyper modern bloated f16 of today that costs x10 what the original design intended (inflation adjusted)?i think im getting a bigger picture of what they were thinking.
>>64194942based
>>64194700Aircraft don't have cunts you sad little loser. They're machines, that is all, and wanting to anthropomorphize them is pathetic. Kill yourself.
>>64194700it turns out if you're going to spend billions developing radars, avionics, missiles and guided bombs that you should probably put them on as many aircraft as you can
>>64194700>You may live to see Bulgarian F-16Vs shooting down Tu-22Ms over the Black Sea.
>>64194950Pretty much. The F-16A was the dream fighter of the fighter mafia, and all the block variants since have been about forcing it to be an actually useful 4th gen multirole. The original Vipers weren't even fully day/night capable with their sensor suite, let alone serious BVR capabilities or a lot of other things we'd just take for granted in a 4th gen these days.Even at the time it was questionable, there was a special 'Air Defence Fighter' variant of the A kitted out to be a more useful interceptor. Particularly with the end of the cold war and any possible utility in 'fighter we can lose by the hundred and shit out by the thousand' was lost, now the plane needed to either compete with the thoroughbred expensive planes or get left behind. Turns out, Lockmart are pretty fucking good at bolting shit onto an airframe.>>64194935>design a plane around a hypothetical war over a specific tiny placeIt's not the only one. The A-10 is the most famous example, and in the rotary-wing world the AH-64 was also basically built for the Fulda Gap. Blow the absolute fuck out of advancing Soviet armour and mechanised.
>>64194740You are only partially right. Cold war budgets allowed for different platforms for different roles. The fight mafia would have loved to keep pure air superiority fighters but they also have to perform other missions now.
>>64197302>The fight mafia would have loved to keep pure air superiority fighterslol, no. their light day fighters were their air superiority fighters. fighter mafia was simply retarded.
>>64194700THICKER>t. research department
>>64194700the same way f35 started as a bomber and now they claim its multirolesimple
>>64194700The CFT's are optional and can be uninstalled then it looks normal
