The Thud Lives On

[bcyc 18]

I have a friend who is a massive F-105 nut. One day we got to wondering what would happen if the USAF had continued on with the Thud in service, rather than retiring it in 1984. Perhaps it would have been put to work as a precision strike aircraft? Perhaps F-16 procurement would have been slower and some ANG units would have wound up with the 105 instead?

 

I fired up Gimp, and with the help of Centurion's templates, I present to you a rough draft of the F-105H, an upgraded D model capable of carrying the LANTIRN pod and precision munitions. The cockpit is also upgraded with the F-16A's HUD and RWR.

 

I did schemes for the Wyoming and Vermont Air National Guards

[dsawan 613]

thud nut myself, do hope you can release when can

[bucklehead101 29]

nice! I tried it a while back, but didnt get nearly as far as you.

 

[+daddyairplanes 8,641]

looks good both!  given how the Phantoms were maintained i would make the Vermont birds look abit more worn out, but the Wyoming birds are sharp!

my historical two cents.... the Thuds were retired because of being worn out over North Vietnam.  any upgrades would have had to included refurbishing the airframe to add more hours and this likely would have cost as much per two Thuds as one new Falcon. sounds like a bargain except that again the Thuds were pretty used up and even a refurb would have been less capable, as well as only around 200 or so left max. (half the production of ALL Thuds was lost in SEA, the rest were maxing airframe life by the 80's) final note, the inside was pretty maxed out with little space. a new radar could have surely been put in, but much of the other equpment would have needed to been scabbed onto teh outside somewhere, like the hump on the T-Stick birds.  not trying to sound too critical,  it is an awesome idea and great skins. i'm a big alternate history nut and believe very firmly in the part about make the most minor changes.

[bcyc 18]

Good point about the avionics - if we had a Thunderstick-style hump to add I'd use that, but my modeling skills are far worse than my painting skills (which themselves are completely lost in the absence of a good layered template). For the sake of this mod we'll pretend that miniaturization of circuitry paid off big time.

 

Point taken on the paint too, especially the Ethan Allen on the tail of the VT birds (does anyone have the full-length logo they use in real life? The best I could do is taken from a vector file of the unit's patch from his waist up - I almost like it better). I'll try dropping the opacity of the decal a bit more, and maybe darken the cigar band. But, then again maybe the USAF just undertook a "Dupont overhaul" and made them look nice. The look I was going for was that of an ANG F-16, which are for the most part maintained well cosmetically.

[bcyc 18]

nice! I tried it a while back, but didnt get nearly as far as you.

 

What do you mean, that looks great! I like how you got the feathered paint on the tail, I'm still learning how to do that in Gimp. Weathering also looks a lot better.

[Centurion-1 1,228]

Nice work, really like the skins! It's good to see the templates being put to good use!

 

If we really want to go alternate history here it would probably not be impossible to imagine a scenario where the US involvment in Vietnam was more limited, and thus more F-105s would be avaliable for upgrade Or heck, just image in a larger production run 

[+Stary 2,426]

maybe someone could do us such version with the mentioned avionics hump?

 

I manipulated OP's picture to clarify my idea:

 

 

not to mention someone modernizing it would have to do something to those puny intakes (only part in design of Thud I don't like since ever)