While regular Frontier Navy strike cruiser air wings are equipped with Harrier FA.9A (basically a Harrier GR.9A equipped with Blue Vixen radar; soon to be replaced by F-35B), Foreign Auxiliary fighter detachments currently operate Freestyle F.2 from their Skyhook warships and light aircraft carriers, where their folding wings and hinged nose radomes are greatly appreciated as the afore-mentioned features facilitate storage within the smaller ships' hangars.
The previous F.1 designation is applied to the configuration as the Frontier Navy explorations found it on its world of origin and, upon the establishment of the Foreign Auxiliary sub-branch, decided to incorporate it as the fighter aircraft of this naval service wing. F.2 is the result of an update, with the difference from the F.1 model including the compatibility with Frontier Navy's current stock of AIM-132 ASRAAM dogfight missile and AIM-120 AMRAAM medium range air-to-air missile, the same helmet-mounted display used by Harrier FA.9A to cue those missiles, and integration into the datalink network used by the Armies of Frontier Nations.
Freestyle is primarily intended for fleet air defense as well as reconnaissance and is therefore optimised for air-to-air combat; any air-to-surface guided weapon, with the exception of anti-ship missiles, must be employed through third-party target designations. The subsonic Harrier FA.9A, having been integrated with a wide variety of surface attack ordnances and sensor pods, is generally seen as being more versatile and capable of carrying more weapons in comparison. Some believe this development to be deliberate, allegedly one of the measures intended to limit the Foreign Auxiliary's status to being a defensive support wing of the Frontier Navy.