Nied

Indeed the S in UNS Air Force and UNS Marine Corps stands for Spacy.

We've all been asuming Nora was either lying or wrong. But what if the Anti-UN really did develop Variable fighters? Think about it, why develop giant humanoid mecha that can transform into a plane to fight giant humanoid infantry, which assumedly can not fly? My theory is that the UN only developed Destroids as part of ther original plan to combat giants. The Anti-UN seeing the UN developing these giant walking tanks developed variable fighters as a way to combat them. The UN not wanting to be upstaged started a crash program to do the same, so as to combat this new anti-UN mecha and thus their variable fighter program came into being. It was only later that the UN decided that Variable fighters might be an effective way to fight giant aliens.

F-117 is old and getting unsuportable (though I suppose they could build more), the B-2 is mighty expensive to operate and more of a strategic solution, ditto with the B-1, with the added disavantage of not being a very stealthy design (redesigned intakes or not). The F-15C is more than good at what it does, but it's also getting old and it will eventually be unsuportable, and I doubt the Air Force would want to replace them with more F-15s. While the F-22 could be very easily be turned into an extremely effective strike platform, with only 339 of them to go around (or is it 200 now, I can't remember) they can't be everywhere, besides which they wouldn't be perfect for everything (CAS and FAC come readily to mind). edited for grammar and punctuation

AFAIK the F-35A is supposed to be an F-16 that can be stripped of all it's external weapons to become a fairly stealthy (IIRC it's purported to be almost as stealthy as the Nighthawk) first day of war weapon. Otherwise it's comperable in performance to the F-16. I think the USAF took a hit for the other services, who got a fairly stealthy plane with the performance of an F-16 that could either a. Land on a carrier(USN/RN), or b. Land anywhere it wants (USMC/RAF/RN).

Still waiting to get my copy of Photoshop back from my mom (and to see Vinnie's 3-D model).

Being one of the other Aviation nuts around here I thought I'd take a stab at this. Judging from my Yamato, a VF-1 wouldn't have much wing area available at it's maximum sweep (that is with the back pack in the unfolded postion) I'm guessing that's the oversweep position that the compendium is talking about. From the looks of it there wouldn't be any real advantage to folding up the backpack and folding the wings all the way back. Just point every other plane in the oposite direction (like they do with Tomcats now) and you'd get them to take up the just about same amount of space (give or take a few feet).