Description: Description: The story of the F16’s in Italy began before 2000 in the 90’s, when Italy had in service a lot of F104 S, ASA, and ASA M that were planned to be replaced with the Eurofighter Thypoon, but the project and the construction of the EFA were very slow, and for that reason Italy asked some nations to lease some fighter aircraft to stop the gap between the withdrawal of the Starfighter and the entry into service of the Eurofighter. The first nation was Britain which agreed to lease 24 Tornado ADV aircraft. When the leasing program ended, it was intended to lease the ADV for 10 additional years, but the cost was too high, and the project was cancelled. The second nation that accepted the leasing projects for Italy was the USA. In 2003, a contract was signed for 5 years (plus 5 more additional years if needed) for 34 F16 Falcon. The program was worth a total of 777 million dollars, and the estimated duration was 10 years. Were delivered a total of 1 BLock 1B + 26 A Blocks (15 ADF) + 1 Block 15 B + 2 Block 5 B + 1 Block 10 B + 4 Block 10A. The only Italian Block 1 was a two seat and it was used for train pilots. It served in the Italian air force at the eighteenth group for all the peace ceasar program duration and it later returned to the united states. After 2014 it was scrapped in the usa since it was an old model and it was replaced with more modern units. in game, the weapons lodout will be identical to the F16 Block10.
Why it should be in the game: It could be a good option for a premium/event veichle for the Italian tt, since Italy hasn’t received such veichle from a good amount of time
+1, could also fit in the tech tree in the current space of the Italian ADF, if the Italian ADF was capable of mounting AMRAAMs once those are implemented in game
From what I think it would be a good fighter to give Aim-9Ms to and put it around 12.3-12.7 and put after the F-16A ADF cause right now Italy doesn’t have very good fighters for top tier battles. Sure there’s the F-16A ADF but you only get Aim-9Ls for IR missiles which are pretty trash now after the missile nerf, all you need to unlock them is one flare while the rest of the fighters you’re fighting have R-73s and Aim-9Ms so to me it would give Italy a fighting chance in top tier.
statistically, the ADF is the best Italian F16, and it could also get the aim9LI/1 (M equivalent). unfortunatly gaijin doesn’t care about it’s situation and if nothing change the aircraft is going to suffer even more
For me I feel though that Italy is kind of lacking in higher tier jets and adding this could help fill in the tree. Also this would be great due to it being able to carry a bomb payload like most other country’s 12.0+ fighters.
The issue with that is none of the F-16s in the game are below 12.0, even the 2 seater Barak. So what will probably happen is if they add Aim-9LI/1s to the F-16A ADF, and that’s a big if, it will probably be bumped to 12.3-12.7 and the F-16B Block 1 will probably be 12.0 if they only give it Aim-9Ls and Aim-7Ms like the ADF has at the moment.
This is super neat, because it both gets Italy a two seater F-16 (I like the variety of two seater modern combat aircraft. And I think they kinda look cool too), but also gets Italy a decent CAS F-16.
