Why did early korean war jets carry big bulbous tanks on the tips of their wings (like the F2H banshee or F84 thunderjet)? How do modern jets manage with higher performance engines?

Question

Like, why not carry them slung under the wings like bombs? Fire bomb tanks have similar shapes and those were slung under the wings.

And from what I’ve seen of public modern fighter jets, they carry their drop tanks under their wings like a bomb.

In: Engineering

Answer 1

The thin wings and slim bodies of early jet fighters meant that they couldn’t carry a lot of fuel inside their wings or fuselage. So they had wing tip fuel tanks which also helped with reducing drag from wingtip vortices.

They stopped with it because as jets got faster and more maneuverable it put an unacceptable strain on the wings. Instead wings got thicker and shorter (with more room for fuel) and the internal fuel-tank structure got a lot more complicated. Not super complicated in early successors like the F4 phantom (which has very big fuel tank stretching all along the aircrafts belly), but F-14/F-15/F-16/F-18 have a whole bunch of internal fuel tanks trying to utilize every space inside the aircraft hull (the F-16 has 7 different fuel tanks for example. 2 in the wings and then 5 inside the fuselage).