Hello,
I have a suggestion to make. Waitaminute, this is the feature requests board, of course this is a suggestion.
Anywho, I've been looking around the forums and the online ufopedia, and there is no hint or suggestion of a long endurance(Thinking days, weeks maybe) aircraft anywhere, despite how useful this might be to Phalanx and anyone shipping/watching anything in general. Two prototypes of nuclear aircraft were developed by the US during the Cold War, a manned bomber and a strategic cruise missile, were capable of endurance measured in months.
I think it would be implemented like this:
*It's big. No one's using fusion practically in the game, otherwise Phalanx would be using it. So it's critical/subcritical fission, and that means reactor shielding and coolant. So, it's large, not at all agile, and probably fixed winged.
*It's fast, with insane amounts of "fuel". The cruise missile in question, Project Pluto, was theoretically capable of supercruise(supersonic cruising) for months before hitting a target.
*Because it uses a nuclear reactor and is big to begin with, it can carry a lot of stuff you wouldn't trust to UN shipping. Stuff like antimatter.
*It can use bigger/better/more exotic equipment, for same reasons as above. Like antimatter missiles or base radar.
*It can be upgraded to antimatter easily. It's already built with a large, high thrust engine in mind, so adding an antimatter engine is a matter of reinforcing the plane.
*Because it's using nuclear/antimatter propulsion, it might be capable of lifting it's self into orbit.
This is the one thing I'm not sure about; might be cool to have an early space interceptor as a stopgap, but possibly game breaking for being able to nail the carriers in orbit early.
That's what I got. Comments?