Comments by "LRRPFco52" (@LRRPFco52) on "Australian Military Aviation History" channel.

@SosaBoii-t1c Uh, McDonnell Douglas was the biggest fighter manufacturer for the USAF and allies at the time, and remained so into the 1980s. F-4E was still in production, F-15 was in production, and F/A-18 hadn't yet gone into production.
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Yup. That's crazy talk right there, supercruise at M2.4 in an F-4. Mach 1.4 would be doable with a slick jet and F100 class thrust, with boundary layer management adjustments and optimized engine design. Mach 2.4 in mil power? Someone is smoking crack.
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@v8packard Why do you think it would have cost less to test & develop, then make new ST-21s or ASFs? F-14 airframe is far more costly to produce due to complexity. There would have been a new air vehicle flight sciences, safety of flight, and performance envelope test program due to all the new materials and subsystems. Same with carriage/separation tests for the larger assortment of weapons. RDT&E is about $20 Billion for a new fighter, before we even get into acquisition. DoD had already decided in the 1980s that all new fighter/attack/bomber airframes needed to have LO or VLO features. None of the proposed Tomcat airframes had the ability to use a serpentine intake ductwork, so the compressors are visible from frontal aspect, contributing to its very large RCS. Then there's the maintenance aspect of it. Even the F-14D averaged 40-60hrs per flight hr. You had to generate 4 birds in order to get 2 that flew.
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@SoloRenegade Thrust, Drag, Weight, Fineness Ratio, Area-Ruling, Mass Air-Flow, Boundary Layer management, Mach Wave formations, and many other factors come into play that people outside of this world have never dealt with. You can't "brute force" your way through these problems. Even the SR-71 had to fly a specific stepped altitude profile to get up to speed at its very high cruising Flight Level. The fineness ratio between an SR-71 and F-4 is dramatically-different.
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 @SUNNYSTARSCOUT365 Super Hornet has a far superior AESA Radar and Long Range BVR Missile, the NAIM-174B.
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@v8packard I'm referring to the proposed ST-21 and ASF designs, not F-14D. If you look at fleet mx data from 1970s-2000s, even the F-14D was 40-60 MMH/FH. Engines were only one factor in wrench hours. FLCS, avionics, structures, and cockpit required a lot of mx. Navy took some of the technologies from A-12 and put them into the Super Hornet. It has LO features, not VLO. Every Tomcat driver that transitioned to Super Bugs said the first major difference they noticed was availability.
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