You have a real good point, Phil.
One of the things that always surprised me, no matter how many times I re-learned it, was that more of the "right kind" of horsepower always got a heavier airplane through the pattern. it's sort of like the 4-stroke package: the really well set up ones grunt in the corners better, and the pilot reports come back that, "Even though the plane is now nose-heavy, it turns better!" How many combat ships slow down if you make constant tight maneuvers? All of them! I think that one of our goals is a plane that cannot be slowed down, even very briefly, by cornering hard. Then we won't have to fly artificially fast to keep from falling out of a hard corner. Then we have to deal with the line tension issue, if we want to fly slower. Several folks have messed with vectored thrust, like Wild Bill, and Charles Mackey. Does it work? If not, what were the problems? If fuel delivery was one of the issues, we can solve that one!
later,
Dean