The Best of the Best....Air superiority Fighters, page 3

Right, here goes the history lesson

Murcielago said;

When France broke out of that because of there need for it to be carrier capable they still had all the design aspects of that plane (becasue they to had spent money on it). Much of the plane is the same, France only changed what they needed to to make it a good Navy aircraft. Just because it looks a little different doesn't mean they dont come from the same aircraft design.

So do you consider the Super Hornet to be a completly different aircraft then the Hornet because they dont look the same?

No, they did not have the design of the plane (EFA) as it had not been designed when the split happened, the split occurred during the definition phase when the three major partners were all working on trheir own separate designs. These were the BAe P.110, MBB TKF.90 and Dassault ACX. The Typhoon is a combination of the BAe P.120 and the very similar TKF.90, France did not 'only change what they needed to' but went on alone and continued with their own ACX which became the Rafale, far from them looking 'a little different' there is, in fact, no design commonality whatsoever between the Rafale and Typhoon.

Your comparison with the Hornet/Super Hornet is utterly wrong as they ARE both designed from the same airframe by the same company, hence the fact that the Super Hornet is still an F-18. I could return the purile comparison by saying do you consider the F-22 to be a variant of the F-15 because it is still a twin jet, twin finned, single seater US fighter? Of course not, but that is how far wide of the mark your comparison was.

Devilwasp, this is also wrong;

Much of the hawker hurricane and the spitfire where the same yet they are two diffrent fighters,

The only things that were common to the Hurricane and Spitfire were the Merlin engines, Browning machine guns and De Havilland propellers. The Spitfire was designed with the then revolutionary all metal stressed skin construction which allowed for a much smaller lighter and faster aircraft but which took longer to produce while the bigger, heavier, slower Hurricane was designed around the same principles as the previous generation of biplane fighters with much of the airframe being fabric covered, although the wings became stressed skin type by the time production started. This allowed a rapid build up of production quickly as it was all designed around proven techniques. Bearing this in mind the two designs could not have been more different from each other, the benefits were that the Spitfire had all the performance but the Hurricane allowed us to get rid of our obsolete Furies and Bulldogs before the outbreak of war and is the reason that the Hurricane was the main British fighter in the Battle of Britain.