kernals12
Banned
I'm going to tell you the story of two fighter jets from the same time period for very similar roles that wound up with starkly different reputations.
The MIG-21 and Lockheed F-104 Starfighter were both billed as highly manueverable lightweight combat aircraft. The MIG would wind up being the greatest fighter of its era, lauded for its amazing combination of speed and agility.
The F-104 turned out to be more dangerous to its own pilots than any enemy aircraft and it was later revealed that the company that built it resorted to bribing politicians in several countries to get their air forces to buy it.
The 2 planes met for the first time in 1971 in the war between Pakistan, who had F-104s, and India, who had MIG-21s. The result was predictable.
So what if the planes had switched at birth, that is, a plane identical to OTL MIG-21 (with American-made engines of course) had been conceived by the Lockheed corporation and entered service as the F-104 while a plane identical to OTL F-104 had been conceived by the Mikoyan-Gurevich design bureau in the Soviet Union and entered service as the MiG-21?