| Looking good, but certainly seing some serious changes over time here, my only concern here, would be that the current design looks a little too like the french Rafale fighter.
I think the wingtips are now far too sharp, do you intend to mount missile rails on the tips or keep this sharp tip, or maybe round them out a little?
How about a RCS pod on each wing-tip - make it like a wing-tip fuel tank, but much smaller, and flattened - perhaps you could also put split top and bottom airbrakes on the rear end of these pods, then they could not only act as air brakes, but could act differentially like the control surfaces on a B2 bomber to provide pitch and roll as well, to supplement the RCS thrusters.
Vectored thrust would also provide some degree of pitch and yaw, but you would need two engines to use vectoring for roll.
I have to say that I am always a fan of the redundency that at least two engines provides - damage to one, still get out of trouble.
Those twin holes underneath about midway, are they intakes or reverse thrusters?
If they are reverse thrusters, perhaps they could also be vectored downwards for some degree of vertical landing?
The flarings on the nose, are they sensors, weapon ports or are they the reverse thrusters?
@Berkut: just to be a trainspotter, the Mig-23 flogger and the Mig-27 (basically the same aircraft but for ground attack rather than air-to-air) both had one single large engine. And besides, the number of engines should not really be considered a step in design evolution, after all, the F-16 has one, and the up-comming joint strike fighter (f-35) will have one, and it will be same generation as the F-22 (but let's not get into argument over which one is best!) |