Gunship

The term gunship originated in the mid-19th century as a synonym for gunboat and also referred to the heavily armed ironclad steamships used during the American Civil War.

Today, the term gunship refers to aircraft armed with heavy guns primarily intended for attacking ground targets.

World War II aviation

Bomber escort

During 1942 and 1943, the lack of a usable escort fighter for the United States Army Air Forces in the European Theatre of Operations led to experiments in dramatically increasing the armament of a standard Boeing B-17F Flying Fortress, and later a single Consolidated B-24D Liberator to each have 14 to 16 Browning AN/M2 .50 cal machine guns as the Boeing YB-40 Flying Fortress and Consolidated XB-41 Liberator "heavy fighters" respectively; each meant to accompany regular heavy bomber formations over occupied Europe on strategic bombing raids for long-range escort duties. The YB-40 was sometimes described as a "gunship" and a small 25-aircraft batch of the B-17-derived "gunships" were built, with a dozen of these deployed to Europe; while the XB-41 remained a prototype only.

Gunship (video game)

Gunship is an AH-64 Apache helicopter combat flight simulator video game that was developed and released by MicroProse in 1986. Simulating a helicopter gunship, players navigate through missions to attack enemy targets and protect friendly forces.

Gameplay

The game features missions in seven regions, including the USA (training), Southeast Asia (1st Air Cavalry Division), Central America (82nd Airborne Division), Middle East (101st Airborne Division) and Western Europe (3rd Armored Division). After selection of region, style, and enemies, the pilot is assigned a primary mission and a secondary mission. These could include such objectives as "Destroy enemy headquarters" or "Support friendly troops" (i.e. destroy targets near friendly forces). The latter would be an easier mission, because the battle would be fought closer to friendly lines.

The pilot then arms the Apache helicopter gunship, usually selecting AGM-114 Hellfire Air-to-Ground Missiles (guided missiles that destroy "hard" targets such as bunkers and tanks), FFARs (Folding Fin Aerial Rockets; unguided rockets that destroy "soft" targets such as infantry and installations), and HEDP (High-Explosive, Dual-Purpose) rounds for the 30 mm cannon (an all-purpose weapon with a maximum range of 1.5 km); in Central America, the Middle East, and Western Europe, AIM-9 Sidewinders would also be standard equipment, usually as a backup air-to-air weapon in case of cannon failure

Gunship 2000

Gunship 2000 is a helicopter combat flight simulator and is the sequel to Gunship by MicroProse. It was released in 1991 for DOS. Amiga, Amiga CD32 and PlayStation versions were released in 1993, 1994 and 1996 respectively. The PlayStation version was retitled as simply Gunship, but was sometimes still referred to as Gunship 2000.

Gunship 2000 significantly enhanced and expanded the features and gameplay from the original Gunship. Key areas of change were a move to full 256-color graphics, enhanced terrain and general visuals, the ability to fly multiple helicopter types and finally the ability to command a team of helicopters and their crews.

Gameplay

Gunship 2000 utilised roughly the same format as most of the other MicroProse flight simulators of the time. That is, the player had a profile, chose their combat theatre, and either performed single missions or a campaign. The primary similarity was the randomly generated 'primary-secondary' mission types where the player was given a primary mission (destroy a target / pickup or drop off troops or cargo / recon an objective) and a less valuable secondary objective that included the same kind of tasks as a primary. The campaign strung these missions together in a 'tug-of-war' system. Victories advanced the player's side towards victory and harder missions, defeat went the other way (though the missions sometimes got harder too).