Helicopter armor

[Imp]

Originally Posted by Airborne Rifles

US Apaches in Afghanistan have taken heavy small arms fire (and damage) and stayed in the fight. Examples are Operation Anaconda (Not A Good Day to Die is a good book about this) and the battle for COP Keating. I remember the Hinds in Afghanistan were considered pretty much invulnerable to anything smaller than Oerlicons or missiles as well.

Okay lets review this
So attack helos were attacked & damaged by small arms fire?
If so then the game doing so on occasion is not far off.

In cases where they were damaged & decided to stay was this because all they faced was small arms fire, in other words no dedicated AAA or real threat like MANPADS?

This presents a bit of a problem I am guessing game wise in that helos would need to access the threat & react differently. Run if dedicated AAA stay if otherwise.
Could possibly be done based on warhead size, size 1 would be small arms or MG anything bigger is a major threat.
Cold war type battle they would bug out due to dedicated AAA but vs insurgents etc they might stay is what I am getting at.

I am guessing this bit of code is a mess though so lots of work, damaged helos sometimes have a fit & recover if fired at as retreating. Has pros & cons in that it can get itself killed but it can also deplete air defence ammo as its not much use anyway.

I would still in most cases withdraw the damaged unit for a number of reasons.
Firstly damage may well make it fairly inaccurate so chances of it being battle effective are lessened.
Conversely the chances of it dying are higher as it probably wont evade so well & I don't want to risk losing the unit as they are normally high points value.

Just saying not sure there is an easy answer here.

On the transport helo option forget the points look at USA military doctrine.
As you said hi risk op do you not think USA of all countries would put them in the best stuff available to actually get them to the mission with the minimum of loses.
Don't quote me on this but I reckon USA has the best protected (EW) transport helos around because of this thinking.