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Old 06-03-2019, 05:36 PM
Vespers War Vespers War is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by madmikechoi View Post
There's a bunch of shit that was in 1.0 that didn't make it to 2.0/2.2 for reasons- namely military budgets are not finite and at some point the juice ain't worth the squeeze.

The Northrup F-20 was probably one of the latter ones especially when Ronnie Raygun threw out the Jimmy Peanut export restrictions combined w/ the fact the US could not or wouldn't license a lot of the tech for production for countries who wanted the F-20 Taiwan and Korea (Starcraft kind not feed Hans Brix to sharks kind).

In the end there were two F-20ish like fighters the FA-50 which is powered by the GE F404 and regarded as a advanced/lead in fighter trainer/light fighter bomb truck and the Taiwanese F-CK-1 which had to forego P&W or GE turbofans in favor of two smaller afterburning Garretts/Honeywell which has a similar footprint of the old J85 used in the F-5s.

IOW any F-20 in Tw2k will only exist b/c the US will play ball and allow countries to crank out a significant portion of the a/c and/or foreign avionics integration although this would allow Big Navy to replace the F-5Es in their DACT syallbus at Fallon
Another problem for Northrop was that because of the political considerations around the F-5G/F-20, only the State Department was allowed to market it, while McDonnell Douglas and General Dynamics could market the F-15 and F-16 independent of the USG. By the time that policy was changed, the F-16C was available with the potential to carry Sparrow, which killed the F-20's main selling point over the F-16A.

The Taiwan sale fell apart because of an arrangement between the Reagan administration and the PRC. South Korea decided to build indigenously (though using the F-20's radar) after a Tigershark was crashed during a demonstration there, and the only other order was Bahrain requesting 4 aircraft, which wasn't enough to justify production. Once the F-16 had been selected for aggressor duties (due to GD massively underbidding the contract to freeze Northrop out), nobody international was willing to take a risk on an airplane the US wouldn't fly. The key to whether or not the F-20 is in service overseas is whether the F-16N sale happens. If the F-20 is bought for aggressor duties instead, maybe the international sales happen.
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