Have you or your players ever had to fight a helicopter? How did the fight go?
Should gunships be statted with low survivability and high evasion?
inb4 some asshole brings up J-CATCH
>>46473833
I haven't, but I enjoy the concept of this thread.
Bump.
My players are going to later in the campaign.
Kinda concerned how I'm going to represent it in a map though - those things move fast and I need to account for height.
>>46473833
Haven't had one in any of my games yet, but I'd say
>Should gunships be statted with low survivability and high evasion?
Seems to be a pretty decent approach. Yes, attack helicopters are often armoured to some degree, but usually they're still at least somewhat vulnerable to even HMG fire since you simply can't protect everything without making it unfeasibly heavy. The armour generally just means that when hit they're not instantly destroyed, but they might still be effectively mission-killed and forced to retreat.
So yeah, if you do incorporate one, they should be very lethal, very fast, very maneuverable, but also fairly vulnerable if you do manage to get a hit in. It's well suited for a game of cat and mouse where it's trying to hunt down the party while the players try to engineer a situation where they can actually get a good shot in with their heavy weapon(s) without getting pasted first.
>>46473833
>Should gunships be statted with low survivability and high evasion?
Depends on the setting. Also the system.
>>46473833
A few times during a traveller campaign. They were on a hostage rescue mission and the terrorists had a grav copter.
the PCs ended up shooting the pilot through the window with a laser rifle.
On a more wargames related note, we regularly have helicopters as part of our modern tabletop game. They die very quickly.
Last game had an apache hit by a shilka, only to go into a spin and collide with a cobra. Both helicopters were totalled.
>>46473833
Was it... A HIND D?!
Futuristic hovercraft and tiltrotor craft but no helicopters.
Twice they took cover till backup arrived. Three times it was a shoot-out with heavy guns and once our DM concocted a convoluted plan so we could attempt something akin the the Jigabachi scene in Ghost in the Shell.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h35rJBiIoRE
It worked somewhat but two of us were killed and our resident sniper ended up unloading several HE rounds into it just to be sure.
>>46473833
The state of the setting's firearm art is analogous to Kentucky rifles. The (guerilla) party knows that massed saf can bring down the baroque airships with fair consistency - but if they hear the sound of an approaching ornithopter, they've learned the hard way to make like a hole ASAP. Fwiw, they're traveling to consult a distant "mad monk" whose offers of something called Seeker Missiles to nearby regimes are rumored to have - so far - been laughed-off as lunacy by The Barons ...
>>46479013
Well yeah, the idea of having seeking anti-air missiles in what amounts to a pre-WWI context (at best) is pretty fucking silly.
>>46473833
The players in my supers-style campaign had to go up against a small mixed fleet of attack and transport helicopters, but one guy ended up taking most of them down on his own.
>>46473833
Best use of an attack heli against players is how Half Life 2 did it: use it as a boss that chases the players into a more confined space, ratcheting up the tension. In this scenario, small arms fire should be useless against it, forcing the players to find some other way to combat the heli's superior firepower. Maybe a SAM launcher or something similar.
Fighting a helicopter is cool. What's cooler is the situation fighting that helicopter puts the players in.
>>46479265
Fuck if it isn't cool, though.
Yes. It didn't go well for them. B they learned why gunships are murder incarnate against targets without air superiority, minimal cover and low mountains to hide behind.
>>46473833
Yes. He won by throwing a car at it.
>>46482416
I really like the idea of gunships acting as boss fights. Are there any common weaknesses in gunships that would make for a good exploit for defeating them?
>Boss get down! That's an enemy gunship! A single burst from it's machine gun can tear a man in half, tread carefully Boss..
Something like that
>>46485171BOSS GET DOWN
The enemy sniper...
>>46473981
>they're still at least somewhat vulnerable to even HMG fire since you simply can't protect everything without making it unfeasibly heavy.
If we are talking about gunships we need to keep in mind that there is a strong divide in the amount of armor in a pre or post 1980 gunship.
http://science.howstuffworks.com/apache-helicopter6.htm
> According to Boeing, every part of the helicopter can survive 12.7-mm rounds, and vital engine and rotor components can withstand 23-mm fire.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kxxW3TQNQOk
Go to the 1:30 mark for details on armor.
>>46473833
>Have you or your players ever had to fight a helicopter?
In shadow-run my players once fought a armed transport helicopter used by the police.
>How did the fight go?
Almost killed the party troll, dodged the trolls fire and then the pilot died to another PC with a sniper rifle.
>>46485171
>>46485532
>player character is a highly trained soldier
>constantly get told "if you get shot you will FUCKING DIE"
>>46473833
GURPS magazine Pyramid 3-57 "Gunplay" statted up the Mi24 and gave hints on how to use it in various games.
I think the writer was a little harsh when comparing the Hind to western choppers but several models and a huge variety of loadouts are statted in typical GURPS attention to detail.
Gritty mercenaries using Super-Hinds might be my fetish.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jozkC1Lygas
