yeah I know i said i was going to be too buzzed for analysis but I'm a military aviation nerd i can do this in my sleep
see
@Cavalier you wanted effortpost i can fucking effortpost
on top of this i would remind everyone what we use the quad engine version of the UTH-66 Blackfoot which is faster then then normal Blackhawks
It doesn't work that way for two reasons: 1) not having to deal with licensing issues we can just use the actual Blackhawks instead of the Blackfoot as the not!Blackhawk, and 2) physics and the way helicopters work mean that unlike fixed wing aircraft, you don't go faster because you have more engines (or more powerful engines). There is such a thing as the never exceed speed, which for helicopters is basically a speed where you're traveling so fast, your rotors are spinning too fast to generate lift, or vibrations are causing bad things to your rotors and your aircraft. This is why the British Apache AH1 doesn't fly faster than the American Apache Longbow, despite having more powerful engines. That said, what the extra engine power lets you do is carry more payload and fly higher.
= = =
Meanwhile on helos, something to note for any potential deployment:
we have 3 Little Birds and 3 Apaches. I would have liked to have 4 of each, because then we can more neatly do Nam-era White, Red and Pink Team helicopter tactics, but well... actually we can still do that actually.
Edit: Nvm we have 4 little birds as per word of kona, we cant use the apaches yet because we still training crews, but fuckit i keep the effort post in
White Team is a pair of scout choppers (Little Birds for us), the idea being that they will orbit the AO and spot enemy targets/formations. In Nam you had Loaches (Little Bird predecessor) who would usually have one chopper fly down in the dirt to bait VC and NVA into firing on it, while the 2nd chopper would note the locations of enemy fire and talk Red Team gunships or fast air onto the enemies.
Red Team is a pair of gunships (Apache or armed Blackhawk for us); their job is to go and kill whatever White Team birds find.
Pink Team is a hunter-killer pair: you have one scout and one gunship working together (White +
Red =
Pink); the idea is that while the scout circles low playing bait and looking for targets, the gunship is already on station and ready to cover the scout.
So this means we can have 1 White Team, 1 Red Team, and 1 Pink Team, or we can mix the six helos and get 6 Pink Teams. And basically with 3 little birds and 3 Apaches, we can either outfit the little birds like light gunships (turning our helo squadron into not!160th SOAR, we're kinda mostly that way already), or we can use the little birds and Apaches in three seperate Pink Teams. There's an argument to be made that given that most of our helos are probably going to be tied up with evacuation, we need every possible combat asset we can get, and
some light gunship is better than
no gunship - Little Birds can still fire 70mm rockets, afterall.
Or we could stick Crashing Dragon in a Little Bird and put an MG gunner in the rear right seat and a grenader in the rear left seat for a given value of ad-hoc gunship. Assuming Crashing Dragon's flying doesn't traumatise the passengers into being unable to fight. It'd make a kekking omake tho.
Otoh this would also be a pain to manage and deploy so i totally get that for simplicity of use it's more likely the little bird and apache flights are deployed as they are, no mixing about.
cry: hate we have to arm them for war but zombies don't discriminate) on defense duty and pray no one takes advantage of this moment of distraction to assault mother base. Or Eli gets the " smart" idea to start shit with a zombie apocalypse going on.
