Ryan's Ultimate Piston Engined Fighter Had The Coolest Name In Cold War Aviation (And A Jet Engine)

Ryan's Fireball was an interesting and innovative solution to the problem of getting a jet fighter aboard ship. Unfortunately it was underpowered and therefore lacked the performance to be useful in a jet-on-jet fight. The solution, inevitably was MORE POWER. And that was what Ryan produced in the XF2R-1 Dark Shark.

Sources:
There are two decent, but long out of print books on the Dark Shark. "FR-1 Fireball In Action" by Ernest McDowell is the better of the two and contains a lot of useful information as well as schematics illustrating development of Fireball into Dark Shark.

Steve Ginter's "Naval Fighters Number 28: FR-1 Fireball and XR2R-1 Darkshark (sic)" contains a number of interesting extracts from the pilots instructions, which give significant technical detail. I personally found its structure a little hard to follow, but it might suit others better!