The AC-130 is my favorite plane.
They’re neat, but I do find them to be quite Spooky.
I’ll see myself out-
You know what I don’t like about them? They’re kind of a symbol of American arrogance and bullying.
It’s only useful where there is zero AAA and zero threat from enemy fighters. It’s a cargo plane - it packs a wallop, of course, but you use it when “the other guy” is a bunch of dudes running around on the ground with no chance to fight back.
The fact that we have them in inventory says a LOT about the types of wars we’ve been fighting for the past 40 years.
(Super unpopular opinion - the A-10 is not much better, but at least it has some genuine anti-armor capabilities.)
It has more to do with the American war strategy in general: air supremacy is just the plan, and America has a lot of tools to root out AA and destroy enemy air forces. Compare to someone like Russia who is explicitly choosing not to dominate the airspace and relying on artillery for its fire support, and as a result has different focuses.
It doesn’t have zero defense against AA- as a commenter upthread pointed out, this picture is literally showing it launching flares against heat-seeking missiles- but it’s not something that’s designed to work only when fighting non-peer forces, it’s essentially capitalizing on the air supremacy that other components of American forces will be creating.
This probably isn’t the right place for my original comment, much less a sprawling debate about US vs. Rest-Of-World doctrine in regards to air superiority, but…the AC-130 is more so than just about any other airplane in the inventory very exposed to enemy fire, and can only be used in a totally permissive environment. Flares are a ‘defense’ against some surface to air missiles (smaller heat seeking MANPADs, specifically), and theoretically against air-to-air heat seeking missiles as well - but even though C-130s (and C-17s and C-5s) have the capacity to deploy flares, they’re a tactic of last resort. A C-130 (and by extension, an AC-130) is going to be totally defenseless against even a very bad, very old fighter jet (like the MiG-17 or MiG-21), will be a sitting duck against any sort of AAA (like a ZSU-23), and even particularly vulnerable to a ‘bad guy’ with a MANPAD, because it literally flies circles around whatever it’s shooting at. Position yourself in its ‘orbit’ and pop off a Stinger or SA-24, and it’s going to be a very bad day for the AC-130 crew.
Any airplane configured for CAS (i.e. flying low with a large bomb load) is going to run into the same threats. But the AC-130 has no other mission. It’s a SPECOPs weapon because it’s for punching down - it’s incredibly useful against dudes on the ground with rifles, and maybe some lightly armored ‘technicals’. It has almost no other uses - in Vietnam they assisted in Search and Rescue missions to recover down crew, but that’s about it. It doesn’t have the survivability of an A-10, nor the multi-mission capability of an F-16/F-15E/F-35/F-18. I guess it’s faster than attack helicopters - but if you’ve seen how short of a life span they can have in a non permissive environment, well…even more so for an AC-130. An AH-64 or AH-1 can duck behind a tree line. Where the Hell is an AC-130 supposed to hide?
I should’ve just giggled - yes, 130 is an incredibly high armor class! You’ll never hit it with an attack roll unless it’s a critical! Ha!
But I sort of do have a problem if the AC-130 is your ‘favorite’ plane. Unique? Sure. Cool? Maybe - there’s definitely nothing else out there flying around with a 105 mm howitzer. Ingenious? Sure.
But if you have any conception of the missions that AC-130s have been flying for the last 50 years (and maybe no one here does!) it’s an awfully strange choice for ‘favorite’ airplane. It’s designed to turn ‘bad guys’ into chunks of meat. It does it cheaply, with a high degree of precision, and with very low threat to SPECOPs operators or friendlies.
In many ways thats what every piece of military hardware is for - and that doesn’t stop me from being impressed with F-15s or B-2s or a whole host of interestingly engineered aircraft. Maybe they all fit into the conception of America as a bully, blowing up dudes with rifles that hate us because someday they might get a missile or a rocket. 🤷♂️
If that’s how you get down - cool! Maybe the mistake was on my part; I could’ve just downvoted and kept it moving and thought how morbid it is. And next time I will, I guess.
Proving again that the solution to high AC is to force DEX saving throws
Make it a CON save and watch the whole world freak out.❤️
Or every front-liners favorite dump stat - INT!
Playing dumb is fun until you realize…you’re not playing.
The A-10 was obsolete on arrival; The only thing that’s kept it “effective” is the AGM-65 Maverick, which almost anything can use now.
Apache Helos, F-16s, and tossing Hellfires from drones do the same job a whole lot better.
All of that fiery stuff is actually defensive. Those are flares that are launched en masse to divert incoming heat seaking missiles. There’s usually a bunch of antiradar chaff getting launched too but it isn’t very visible. So it would be providing a bonus to Armor Class. The effect is sometimes called the “angel flare” because from head on all the fire and smoke patterns resemble angel wings (this mage is zoomed in to much to show the full pattern).
That could probably be a sick way to flavour some protection spell. Casting shield by shooting out an array of flares would look awesome.
In a sense, that’s almost what Mirror Image is with visual targeting.
