phil hunt wrote:



That's certainly true, to some extent. I would however point out
that modern aircraft such as Typhoon as designed to be good at
dogfighting, so certainly the people who designed them thought it
was important.


Currently both the RAF's F3


Eh? What's this? Do you mean the Tornado?

I think that has more to do with some legacy holdover thinking from the
cold war, rather than seeing a future need for a dedicated ACM fighter.

Engagement ranges , tend to be smaller when you were designing a fighter
for the European theater, so French designs tended to be high energy
fighters that relied on IR weapons over Radar weapons, just to use an
expample.

Logistics was another reason , some people I was chatting with ,made the
point that had the russians actually rolled west , quite a few of the
nato partners may have burned up their inventory of BVR weapons in the
first day of the conflict , so an airforce may have had to rely on 20 mm
cannons and sidewinders for as long as that lasted.

Lastly , because of the price of the systems , most european airforces
dont get the most advanced american systems , till about halfway through
the service life , so they may have designed the aircraft to be more
agile to compensate for a lack of decent bvr hardware.

Declan O'Reilly