F9F-3

[Terry]

Never knew this existed until this morning. Picture from Paul Allen's FHC.

How would you control the impact point, they didn't have the means to compute it.

[Sieggie]

Never knew this existed until this morning. Picture from Paul Allen's FHC.

How would you control the impact point, they didn't have the means to compute it.

Looks like the high speed version of "Puff" and "Spooky"

Dave

[SSI01]

I'm trying to figure out why they needed those troughs in the nose cone. I don't think the original F9Fs of any mark had such a significant cutout for the gun barrels, they were under the nose I thought. You can bet your bean sprouts they'd be catching the spent brass and links internally as well, what with those intakes only a few feet behind the muzzles of those guns. What a FOD risk otherwise!

[gradyhappyg]

Weird indeed.
Found this site lots of info and photos of the Panther:http://www.millionmonkeytheater.com/F9F.html
77646

[warchild]

Perhaps its a night fighter variant??

[Craig Taylor]

Perhaps its a night fighter variant??

+1

Reminds me of "schrage musik" (sorry, too ascii-illiterate to find an umlaut on short notice) when the barrels are angled upward like that.

Edit: After checking Brad Elward's "Grumman F9F Panther/Cougar" book, this is apparently the Emerson electric turret, intended to give pilots more flexibility in an air-to-air engagement. The belief was that jet v jet was going to be too fast for a pilot to physically track an adversary, so the turret would do all the work. Early computer technology just wasn't up to the task, however, so this never got out of a test concept.

[pfflyers]

That's a pretty cool concept. With modern fire-control systems I'm surprised they haven't put something like that on modern fighters.