"More Harmful"

Technically just Harmful...

The feared MV-1

was starting to fall behind. Its fierce armament and amazing turnrate gave the MV-1 advantages over the earliest jets, but it was slow, had poor armor, and pilots often suffered from having a hard time seeing past the nose- and this started to show during the mid-Korean War. Aircraft like the F-94 and F-86 were able to overpower and beat it in a fight, while friendly fighters like the MiG-15 or MuG-2 beat it in almost every fly-off. But things weren't just going downhill for the MV-1 in particular, but the entire Misiev company; bombing raids from B-29s and F-84s occasionally hit MV warehouses and factories, one of which strikes hit a warehouse where the MV-2's blueprints and initial prototype were being kept. It really was a bad time for MV.
But they had one trick left up their sleeve. Although the long and hard process of developing a new plane had been indefinitely interrupted by the bombers, they could still do what the Soviet Air Force did best: Copyc- COMMUNISM (Stalin please don't hurt me) Except, unlike other companies, MV had no experience copying- er... communism-ifying other aircraft, so they pulled the safest move in the book: copy and modify their own aircraft. Here's how:
Essentially, they took an MV-1, slapped some swept wings on it, gave it one of the new, stronger engines (which they stol- communism-ified from the British), and changed its armament to two 20mm and two 23mm cannons. Said cannons also improved on fire-rate and range. Although the speed and armament got upgrades, the agility and armor remain unchanged for better and worse respectively. Regardless, the Harmful's upgrades should make him a worthy contender in the land of FSF!

Trivia

-The MV-1M was unofficially nicknamed "the peoples' fighter," because a fairly large number of civilians got their hands on retired/demilitarized MV-1Ms. Official records estimate that roughly 154 MV-1Ms are in civilian possession, and to make this number even more insane, this is excluding incomplete models, wrecks, replicas, public museums. Even crazier is that only 650 M-variants of the MV-1 were made (somehow there were less MV-1Ms than Tu-4s, madness).
-Follow-up on that last one, the MV-1M was surprisingly successful in the late Korean War, and more were planned to be ordered (especially since one could essentially just upgrade an MV-1 to an MV-1M), but the end of the Korean War would ultimately spell the end for the entire MV-1 line. However, the MV company would survive and a few years later build the MV-2, which heavily was inspired by the MV-1M.
-Although many FSF aircraft have official variants, the MV-1M is probably the only one that legitimately brings visible and massive changes to the aircraft rather than something like uprated performance or armaments.
-This plane was originally put into my Unlisted posts on December 17, 2024.