Gaiaterra: Elysea's Conflict/Sparrow Scout Helicopter

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The Sparrow Scout Helicopter used by the Survivors. is planned to be voiced by *TBA*

History
"So easy to pilot children can do it."

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According to some Minutemen, the only good thing Zemurians has ever contributed to the Aquilans is their helicopter design. No, not a combat helicopter - it's Zemuria, who are you kidding? Or so goes the Minutemen joke, pointedly ignoring that nation's contributions to the Allied war effort. One of the early commercial successes of Infinity Realm Aeronautics, now known (and loathed) for their (in)famous Achilles air superiority fighter, was a small, lightweight helicopter designed for civilian and military use. The design featured excellent observation capabilities, could mount a small radar array, and, in an unintentional success, was amazingly quiet for a helicopter.

It was this last feature that attracted the aircraft's main buyer: the Embry National Park Service. While the helicopter did serve for a time in the Allied war effort as the HO-3 Sparrow, mainly as a personal flying taxi for high-ranking officials rather than as the observation craft its designation proclaimed it to be, the National Park Service bought significant numbers of Sparrows for civilian use. The Sparrows were favored by park rangers for aerial observation and reaching inaccessible areas of the parks, and later found great favor for air tours of the parks where their surprisingly quiet engines worked well for tourists and the wildlife alike. And when the bombs dropped the Sparrow are rarely seen in the wasteland, at least before the Minutemen inducted them, many believe that they were all destroyed in the nuclear holocaust.

That’s just what their operators want them to believe.

in truth, while many were destroyed by the bombs, there remain numerous Sparrows in Embry. When the final battle began, their pilots, mainly park rangers, quickly hid into their parks underground bunkers, which were built as the war began to escalate. While not all succeeded and many more were killed in the devastation that followed, some managed to survive and continue to travel the now scarred lands.

Having witnessed the devastation man brought upon the earth, they do their best to avoid all contact with others, a task made easier thanks to their jury-rigged, barely functional radar equipment and dead-quiet engines. Even loaners still need supplies, however, and lacking either armament or significant armor they can’t simply barge in and take what they want like bandits. Instead, they stakeout isolated villages, observe any defenses and weaknesses and then sneak in in the dead of night and quietly steal as much as they can carry. Often their victims don’t know they’ve been robbed, at least not until they take inventory. While this seems kinder than the methods of their fellows, in the wasteland where every scrap of food and resources is precious, their actions are just as cruel and deadly as the rest. But once the Minutemen caught on most, if not all, Sparrow bandits were caught and given a choice, join the Minutemen in their restoration of Embry, and train future Sparrow pilots, or be executed.

Needless to say, the Sparrows have recently re-entered military service. The helicopter's ease of manufacture meant that acquiring large numbers of these light helicopters wasn't difficult, nor was finding experienced pilots to fly them. Further complicating this new development for the Allies is the fact that large numbers of Sparrows remain in civilian use within their nations - civilian news teams, a few large police stations, and especially the National Park Service itself all continue to use the Sparrow for precisely the same reasons as the Minutemen. Life is accordingly unpleasant for Allied fighter crews, who face the problem that it's almost impossible to distinguish Minutemen scouting Sparrows/infiltration teams from civilians, and more than one accidental downing of a civilian helicopter by Allied pilots and surface-to-air gunners jumpy about Minutemenhas been spun into very ugly press indeed.

During actual combat operations, however, it is easy to distinguish Minutemen Sparrows. Weapon jammers stolen and salvaged from Andoran hydrofoils have been fitted onto the Sparrow design, but work imperfectly: bereft of a hydrofoil's engine to power the things, helicopter-mounted jammers have to fire in uncontrolled pulses that shut down weapons in a small area of effect, but don't last long. The same lack of power prevents the Sparrows from granting complete radar coverage, and so they have to unleash limited radar pulses instead... And inconveniently reveal the helicopter's location to the enemy.

On many occasions, it has been proven that even young children can fly the Sparrow; despite this, Minutemen commanders refuse to allow those under 17 to fly them in combat situations, no matter how much they beg. However, there are still a large number of older teenagers who take the controls for these aircraft and they are considered the first step to being promoted to flying a Longbow.