Helicopter Drone

Helicopter Drone
Category	Drone
Hit points	1,000
Damage	300 (Ground)
Movement speed	4.2
Space occupied	5
Supply cost	0
Fuel cost	20,000
CP cost	0
Abilities	Medical Supplies
Requires	Office (Level 8)
Hiring time	30 minutes

The Helicopter Drone is a rotary-wing drone unit in ArmA: Mobile Ops.

Overview

• Roles:
  • Air-to-ground fire support
  • Medical support

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A fast and powerful helicopter drone equipped with air-to-ground rockets with splash damage. It moves faster than a Hexacopter Drone and primarily targets the nearest structures - defensive or other. Office Description

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Purpose

The first heavy-duty flying unit that can be unlocked with a Level 8 Office, the Helicopter Drone serves as a more powerful counterpart to the smaller and fragile Hexacopter Drone.

Strengths

Unlike the latter, the Helicopter Drone fires air-to-ground rockets that deal area-of-effect splash damage and doesn't require it to hover directly above the target. It is also designed to be able to support infantry units by dropping a medical beacon that heals all infantry that walk near it.

As previously stated, the Helicopter Drone is tougher and can resist significantly more punishment than the Hexacopter Drone. Though it cannot camouflage itself to remain hidden, it compensates by being able to fly faster and is not hampered by poor mobility (unlike the painstakingly slow Hexacopter Drone).

In terms of damage output, the Helicopter Drone is slightly more reliable than the X35 Jet, which serves as its fixed-wing counterpart. Because it does not need to strafe its targets, the Helicopter Drone can remain fixated on attacking a single building instead of having to constantly loop in wide circles. This means its overall DPS output is more consistent, and can raze even fully upgraded Autocannons with ease; provided the Helicopter Drone itself has been upgraded as well.

Weaknesses

Consequently, this does mean that the Helicopter Drone is guaranteed to take damage from defences that can fire back at flying units. Even though it is more durable than the Hexacopter Drone, the Helicopter Drone is by no means invulnerable to anti-air weapons, with AA Towers remaining just as lethal to it. And unlike the X35 Jet, it won't be able to avoid taking damage since it must remain in position to fire its rockets (even though it doesn't have to hover above the building).

Assuming they power up in time, Drone Launchpad gunships in particular are able to shred Helicopter Drones with impunity since the latter will never be able to fly quickly enough to close in onto the Launchpad's actual "structure" before they get cut down.

Usage

In spite of these drawbacks, the Helicopter Drone still makes for a very effective replacement for your Hexacopter Drones despite its higher fuel cost and space requirement at the Barracks. Once unlocked, the entire fleet should be immediately replaced with Helicopter Drones. They work well alongside your main ground units as a force multiplier, but don't attempt to deploy them against heavy AA until those threats have been neutralised first; either with support powers (EMP, artillery, etc.) or with the ground units.

As with all drone-type units, the Helicopter Drone cannot gain veterancy bonuses from winning battles. It can only be improved via upgrades researched at the Comms Centre.

Abilities

Medical Supplies

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The helicopter drone can drop medical supplies slowly healing all friendly units in 15 meter radius for 3 seconds. Ability description

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The Helicopter Drone drops a medical beacon below its current position that will regenerate the hit points of any infantry squads which are within the beacon's radius (roughly ~ 40-50 HP healed per second). The healing effect continues until the beacon times out or the unit leaves the beacon's radius.

This ability essentially serves as the Helicopter Drone's counterpart to the Light UGV's Spare Parts ability; the sole difference being that instead of repairing ground drones it heals infantry squads and is not applied instantly.

While it might seem useful in theory, this ability generally doesn't work too well with infantry because of several reasons: the Helicopter Drone's movement speed greatly exceeds all squads aside from Force Recon teams, with the latter being too fast for the Helicopter Drone to keep up in the first place.

The second problem is that infantry generally do not survive long enough without a Wheeled UGV shielding them. The likelihood of them being cut down by Mortars or upgraded Machine Guns first is very high, so they will never get the opportunity to make full use of the beacon's healing. And lastly, the healing isn't applied instantly (unlike with the Light UGV) which means that infantry squads will tend to move away from the beacon as soon as it gets dropped.

Altogether, these factors contribute to making this ability redundant as a whole. There is no merit to not using this ability should the occasion arise where you miraculously have infantry squads that are still alive of course, but its use remains very niche regardless.

Trivia

• The Helicopter Drone's model is directly based on the MQ-12 Falcon drone from ArmA 3 that was added with the release of the Apex expansion pack.
• Helicopter Drones did not originally have the ability to drop Medical Supplies until the release of Update 1.14.

Gallery

See also

• Hexacopter Drone

Units of ArmA: Mobile Ops
Infantry	Fire Team • Heavy Team • Force Recon • Engineer Team
Vehicles	Wheeled UGV • Light UGV • Tracked UGV
Aircraft	Hexacopter Drone • Helicopter Drone • X35 Jet
Entries are listed in order of left-to-right, based on the current upgrade level of the player's Office.