Gaiaterra: Elysea's Conflict/MH-6S Maskell

"Maskell chopper ready for liftoff"

-MH-6S Maskell

The KA-6 Harlot is a former Voshkod light gunship that was obsolete by 1981 V.C. and sold it to their Voshkod allies, which Encantadia, one of the Voshkod's allies, modernise as the MH-6S Maskell. Voiced by *TBA*

Tactical analysis

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History
The Alliance's introduction of the AH-53 Longbow and they're putting into practice the novel concept of "air cavalry" was bound, sooner than later, to provoke a Voshkod response. Certainly, the Voshkods would not let things stand when their prized tank divisions were being blown into scrap metal by anti-tank rockets by Alliance Longbows, their bases destroyed by Alliance strike teams transported by Bluejay, yet the Voshkod Air Force lacked even a single functional attack helicopter.

The Voshkod response came soon enough. Shortly after Alliance forces supported by Longbows routed the entire 3rd Tank Division (and destroyed a previously unheard number of Mammoth and EG series tanks), Emet himself (or so it is said) ordered Krasna Aerospace to have a working attack helicopter ready for production in six weeks.

However true that may have been, Krasna managed to finalize and submit their design in that time. To put it simply, the engineers at Krasna took the first helicopter they could find and slapped on some armor and weaponry. After five weeks of blowing up helicopters and their pilots, Krasna finally succeeded with one of their prototypes (a KA-1 utility helicopter with a hastily fitted gun pod and its ammunition) didn't crash shortly after takeoff (or indeed, at any other time during the test flight), Krasna took the helicopter, designated it the KA-6 Harlot, and sent it to Voshkod high command. Unsurprisingly, (considering that they had no other alternative and badly wanted a working gunship on the frontlines as soon as possible) Voshkod high command accepted the helicopter. It proved easy to modify the rest of the Union's inventory of KA-1s to KA-6s alongside Krasna's rival, the new Mil Mi-4 Hounds and redeploy them to the frontlines for combat duties. Soon, hastily constructed helipads all over the front were servicing and supporting Harlots.

However, the impromptu gunship was only a stopgap solution and wasn't exactly perfect. Krasna continued to make refinements to the Harlot, adding more armor, expanding the cargo bay's ammunition capacity, and so on. Numerous models of the Harlot would be produced during the war, but the one that is best remembered in both the minds of Alliance and Voshkod soldiers is the KA-6D Harlot-D, the helicopter's fourth and definitive iteration, and the mainstay attack helicopter of the Voshkod Union for the rest of the war.

Unlike the previous iterations, which were all improvised gunships, the Harlot-D was the first model that could be considered a true attack helicopter, Krasna having completely redesigned the airframe from the bottom up. The Harlot-D sported a Yak-B Gatling cannon, a departure from previous models, which had all made use of crudely welded gun pods. It wasn't long before this model of the Harlot had become both feared and hated by Alliance infantrymen; even more so than the infamous Yak-9 (aka the Infantry Eraser). Successive models would be introduced, but even by the war's end, the Harlot-D still outnumbered any other model of the Harlot, although newer models began to supplant the Harlot-D following the end of the war.

One of the few complaints about the Harlot was that its weapons lacked anti-tank capability. This would go on to be a major sticking point for the rest of the war, since, as Voshkod commanders would point out, the Alliance Longbow had anti-tank weaponry, yet the Harlot didn't (Krasna engineers countered by pointing out that the Longbow lacked any sort of anti-infantry weapon).

That is not to say that the designers and engineers at Krasna didn't try. Throughout the war, they tested several prototype variants of the Harlot. However, all these had some problem or another. Plans for a missile-armed Harlot had to be postponed when Krasna ran into problems regarding the mounting of pylons, which could not be solved in any reasonable amount of time (a missile-armed attack variant of the Mi-4 Hound, did eventually enter service, but only at the end of the war). Another promising project, a Harlot model armed with three 60mm cannons, had to be scrapped, as the Voshkods couldn't find a metal that wouldn't be ripped apart by the stresses subjected to the airframe by the firing of the cannons. Some of the other projects involved an experimental hybrid of transport and gunship, a concept that would later be brought to fruition with the Twinblade and the Harlot II, and a Harlot model which was armed with a folding howitzer that could be deployed while the helicopter was landed (unfortunately, it was found that there was no room for ammo for either the machine guns or the howitzer; besides, the recoil of the howitzer proved too much for the airframe to handle), though the last one had to be made of a new hull. The introduction of the Twinblade during the interwar period made the Harlot obsolete, and as of 1969 V.C. it has been largely phased out of Voshkod military service, though some other countries continue to make use of the helicopters. With Encantadia modernizing it with upgrades, mainly solving the inability to mount anti-tank weapons by making it capable of swapping between anti-infantry machinegun and anti-tank rockets, but due to limited storage space, the change may only be done at the Airforce Command Hub, however. And either weaponry must also be reloaded at an Airforce Command Hub once expended.

Trivia

 * Is appearance is based on the Hind from Red Alert 1. And the name Harlot is the renamed Hind from Paradox, preventing confusion with the Hind helicopter