Shipbucket

You also have to factor in the size of your AU carrier. The F-14 was a massive aircraft and only US supercarriers could launch and recover it. Also size matters when you're determining how many aircraft you want to carry. You can fit more Sea Grippens onto an aircraft carrier than you can SU-33s or F-22s.

Honestly the F-14 was a pretty good fighter and its time didn't necessarily past in terms of its raw performance. But even if they had built the Tomcat 21, it's not very likely it would've been offered for export (it's performance likely would've been simply too high).

Well folks the it stated fleet defence fighter in the title and the F-14 was designed from the ground up to do that. Politics kept it from being developed into a full multi-role design. The Navy went with the Super Hornet upgrade on the heels of the A-12 cluster fook and needed to go with a cheaper design that Congress would ok. Also I stated new production not upgrading worn out airframes. Back in the day as new tech came on line they roled new builds off the line. How many letters did they get up to with the F-4 and A-4 designs. The F-16 line has been rolling off new builds with new tech for years now they just call them Block 20, 30, 40, 60 etc. New tech has been added to new builds of the F-15 Strike Eagle for Korea, Singapore, Israel and Saudi Arabia.

All Block 60s are F-16Es (though granted it official stands for "Emirates")

And because this is somewhat related:

http://www.airliners.net/photo/USA---Na ... 2051487/L/

The CVV design proposed in the late 70's was designed to handle a 12 ship squadron of F-14's and that was a 60,000 ton design so that would probably be the minimum design.
Some folks here seem to be turned off by the Tomcats age but the other designs aren't spring chickens either. The Su-33 and F-18 are 70's designs. The Rafale, Gripen and F-22 are from the 80's. The F-35 was started in the 90's and its looking like it will be 2020 before a large number of them are in service. (If at all)

The F-15 and F-16 are also 70s` designs and yet, nations still buy and upgrade them. There are nations that still use the F-4 Phantom II which dates back to the latest stages of the 50s`. Just becasue it`s old doesn`t mean it`s bad.

There's a difference between "it's an old design" and "they don't make them anymore."

Very true. And speaking of "they don't make them anymore," the Su-33 can be added to that list. The Russians ordered MiG-29Ks to replace their Su-33s because it's not economical to do a limited run of Su-33s and the MiG-29Ks are already in production for the Indian Fleet Air Arm. So, unless the Chinese order a whole bunch of Su-33s in the near future, which isn't likely since it looks like they're planning to make their own carrier aircraft, I imagine they'll be scrapping the tooling for the Su-33 in the near future.

My plan was originally to have my country buy them and then implement its own upgrade program similar to the Tomcat 21 program. But I think I'll go with either Super Hornet, the Rafale, or the Su-33.

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