Latest blog post: Chapter 7 is coming. (2025-10-10)
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So as I said earlier, from this moment forth, humans will enter the story, and they will stay here this time.
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Comments (2)
Erm... he expects to get a ground expedition loaded up and on the road, drive 120 km, and set up a perimeter when they get there in the span of an hour? Even if each endpoint takes only 5 minutes and the road is a direct line, that's still nearly 1.5x highway speed.
And if you apply the same logic to the helicopters, by my research that's faster than any non-experimental helicopter physically can go.
I vaguely recall helicopters to go over 300km/h
But still, getting them loaded that fast sounds like a challenge.
I have heard about a few models that can exceed the usual 260 or so km/h limit, but those are all highly specialized multirotor designs, whereas the ones the airbase scrambled are the regular single-rotor kind.
Well, looking at it while somewhat awake (and having actually seen the helicopters in question): The Soviet Mi-35M (produced since 1972 and still in use with minor upgrades because, quoting my BF, it's the best helicopter design ever made), is the third-fastest helicopter (according to one top-10 list that doesn't feature a date. 8th on a top-15 list from 2020) in the world with a top-speed of 310km/h at level flight. It has a single-rotor and looks quite similar to the models on page 26 (though, there are some differences, like the doors and cockpit shape).
The Mi-35 is also the source of my vague recalling. I saw one in a museum a couple weeks ago and listened to BF swoon about it for a while. I hadn't known/realized at that point that it was even in the top 10 of fastest helicopters.
By the way, only the top 2 of the top 10 have multi-rotors.
Looking at Page 29, they are clearly NOT Mi-35, but Mi-8/17 (which I've also seen in that same museum)
Most likely a recent model like Mi-171Sh, which has a cruise speed of 260km/h and a top speed of 280km/h.
So yes, getting them loaded in time to make 120km in half an hour is a tough call.
Tthe bullet-headed military officer. Always a useful tool in modern story-telling.