Could you perhaps provide a source to show that this has actually been tested? Because i find that very difficult to believe.
With the A-10 I can't source that except to refer to my Air Force counterpart who's a B-52 pilot and has always wanted to fly A-10's and is a walking encyclopedia on them. Unfortunately for him he's at Barksdale AFB, which is the home of both the A-10 and the B-52 right now.
During Op Iraqi Freedom, Apaches from the 101st Airborne attacking a city at night were unable to continue their mission as they had taken multiple hits from small arms fire which had shredded their rotor blades, making it too dangerous to stay in the area without risk of crashing. This wasnt luck...it was a planned method of defence against attack helicopters.
You dont need to take the whole thing out if you can ground the thing instead, thus depriving the attacker of a valuable asset.
The thing about the attack your referring to is that "small arms" in this instance included a barrage of RPG's that connected with the 64 and yet it was still flyable. You've probably seen the video of an idiot flying the AH-64 doing some NOE flying while the copilot is warning him that the trees are too close and the pilot says we're fine and hits two trees at a very low level. The helicopter was still flying, but the rotor blades were out of sync. What's not on the video is that the pilot had autorotated in, stopped the rotors, visually inspected them, and then took took off and head home to report his lack of judgement. Lessons were learned from Vietnam about how reinforced the rotor blades had to be for combat. The amount of gun fire a rotor can take, and I'm talking about what actually connects with the rotor blades, not the disc they make while moving, is very high. To achieve it the helicopter would have to be hovering above crew-served machine guns at close range and let them unload for twenty minutes. I'm not saying that bullets don't do crap to the rotors, because they do, but military helicopter don't use the same things as civilian models do. Military helicopters can lose at least one blade, sometimes two, per disc and still produce enough lift. One of my friends was flying a 64 got hit on the main shaft above the cockpit on the right side, by something explosive that haji wasn't suppose to have (it's classified apparently because no one could tell me), and it blew off part of the cockpit. Both pilots were knocked around silly and were deaf, but the chopper was still flying in a hover and maneuverable (it did some damage to the right-side engine). The 64 is a flying tank, but it's underpowered when fully laden (it's also the only army helicopter with AC).
The military helicopters that need to be updated to modern combat roles are the Kiowa and Chinook, gun fire is more likely to kill passengers than damage needed flight components. The Kiowa has a 700lb computer from the 60's in it's back seat that a graphing calculator can outperform. The 58 has a cool mission, but it was a bad platform even in Vietnam (very under powered - it was a political deal not the result of best in class). The 47 is the only helicopter that's completely operable in the middle east. It has more power than it's airframe can handle at it's ceiling with it's maximum load and they don't upscale the armor because of it's official role, but it needs it sorely. I can go on with the pro's and con's of each frame. I'm a retired Army pilot as of '08.
3.) The assault cannon exist because of Robocop. In the movie, it's a military weapon that's capable of hurting Robocop. It also made large explosions that were fun to watch. While the assault cannons in SR don't make as large of a explosion, the ammo is still basically explosives in bullet form. In older editions, it was basically one of if not the biggest gun you could carry around. In 4th, it's a high base DV option for cracking the hardened armor of vehicles. It's a decent choice against most vehicles (armor 15 or less or 19 if you can call shot). In a military context where you can't use specialty rounds, I could also see it used as an anti-spirit weapon. It's difficult for an assault rifle or a LMG using standard rounds to hurt a Force 6 spirit without called shots (which is -4 dice and still needs 2 net hits to hurt).
That was the Barrett M82 (as the "
Cobra Assault Cannon"), which is a .50 BMG sniper rifle.
