AC4 Hangar Theme

I was working on something else but progress was sluggish and I guess I didn't really have interest in it once I started drawing, so I abandoned it in favor of this. A depiction of lightweight fighters in service with the USAF and USN/USMC from the mid-1980s to the mid-2010s, the Vought Electric Boat Bell F9U (I wrote F8U forgetting that was already the Crusader's designation) Buccaneer and the Northrop F-113 Falcon. Both fighters are directly based off of the F/A-18 and F-16 (which they're analogous to in glorious APW) but are quite different, the F9U's design was practically lifted from a sketch of an earlier concept for the YF-16 that looked eerily similar to the F-35, just prettier. The F-113, on the other hand, was simply an amalgamation of the F-16 and the F-20 Tigershark, considering the fighter design this is supposed to be a successor to, which had its engine air intake on the bottom of the fuselage.

The F9U was originally designed by Electric Boat Bell, hot off of the success of the F-111 Aardvark, as their bid for the USAF's Lightweight Fighter Design contest over their concern for the operating cost of North American's F-112. Much like their submission for the earlier contest that birthed the F-112, EBB's design was rejected but they were unplussed and decided to submit the design to the Navy, who wanted a light multirole fighter to complement the Grumman F14F Tomcat and Douglas Marietta BF7D Dauntless II, with the help of Vought. The design was accepted and entered service as the Buccaneer and Vought bought out Electric Boat Bell in the in 1983. The design that won the contest was to be the Northrop F-113, a successor to the venerable F-102 Fang that served admirably in the United States Air Force and many other air forces around the globe and the Falcon would achieve similar export success, flying in the services of, among others, Finland and Switzerland. Both fighters would be in the front lines in the war with Russia waged in the late 1990s and a small number of F-113s were operated by Gran Colombia when the German-coalition invaded in Unternehmen Rheintocht and their pilots fought bravely against the coalition aircraft to the bitter end rather than fleeing to Peru or Brazil like some of their comrades had done when they had realized the impossible odds. The Buccaneer was exported to a few nations that operated aircraft carriers, such as Argentina and Australia, whose F9Us fought against the Chinese and Nusantarans in the late-2010s war.

The F9U is an aircraft of VFA-195, 'Dambusters', nicknamed after an incident during a conflict in the 1950s where aircraft of the squadron destroyed a dam that had been targeted multiple times by American forces in the past, with its then-current mother carrier being the USS Langely (basically a Forrestal-class). The F-113 is of the 120th Fighter Squadron, part of the Jefferson National Guard 140th Wing, based out of Buckley Air National Guard Base in Aurora.