reply to post by alienstar
What you have to bear in mind is that almost ALL fighters in the mid 1940's were being designed to a fairly rigid template around a straight wing
mounted on the CG and a conventional straight tail and single vertical fin and the advent of the jet engine had not yet really started to break the
pattern.
Aerodynamically the P-80 was the same as the Hawker Hurricane from a decade earlier despite having a jet engine with the pilot still being closer to
the CoG than he is to the nose (also to be seen on the Me 262). British designers basically swapped the pilot and engine positions around to put the
pilot in the extreme nose and the engine in the middle of the plane (ie Vampire, Attacker, Sea Hawk etc) but this was about as adventurous as it got
in these early days.
Having established that fact look at the detail of the design and you can see they are actually completely different from each other.
P-80 = low wing, low tail, straight rudder/fin, lateral fuselage intakes, oval nose section, long jet pipe, drop tanks.
F9F = mid wing, cruciform tail, delta fin/rudder, split-root intakes, circular or 'barrel' nose section, short jet pipe, integral tip tanks.
In fact there is nothing similar about them at all except for the fact they used a tricycle undercarriage and a centrifugal type jet engine.
[edit on 13-5-2008 by waynos]
