F-20 Tigershark - V1 versus V2.2

[madmikechoi]

Originally Posted by Olefin

The F-20 is mentioned as being flown by Iran in the RDF module (V1) as the authors at the time they wrote it thought the F-20 would be going into production - which never happened. When the V2.2 came out there is no mention of the F-20 Tigershark in any of the releases for V2.2 – which may indicate that they took into account that the plane didn’t go into production – which by the time V2.2 was written was a fact.

So is the F-20 in the Twilight 2000 universe or is it highly dependent on which version you play? Reason I am asking is looking at the fighters that Kenya is flying in the East Africa Sourcebook - I wrote it initially more towards V1 – but it was approved as a V2.2 release so I had the Kenyan's keep the F-5's. If the F-20 had gone into production they would have been a customer for sure but didnt see it in the V2.2 as a reality.

Interested in the board’s opinions on if the F-20 is version dependent as to it being in Twilight 2000.

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