Fixed Wing vs VTOL

VTOL makes sense otherwise planes can't land very easily or in too many places.

That's the interesting thing. You gotta have space for them in order to reap their benefits. Otherwise every unit might as well be a fast VTOL gunship since that would be optimal.

More importantly, they would have a hard time getting off the factory pad!

Don't see a problem with how it was done in SupCom. Just imagine the planes have some kind of vertical thrusters or anti-gravity pads. Also the factories could have anti-gravity pads that get activated upon completion of the production process of the plane to 'throw' it up in the air.

Exactly, VTOL Landing Capabilities don't mean the flight behavior is limited by that, see Harriers and V-22 for a prime example.

In the end, this comes down to having VTOL Capabilities just makes them a lot more user friendly in terms of gameplay.

Mike

Plus VTOL just looks badass.

VTOL in supcom looks supremely silly. If there's going to be vtol at least make it look cooler.

?? What VTOLs are there in SupCom?

I never really zoomed in enough to see how VTOL looked in Supcom. :lol: I refer to the aircraft in TA.

It dawns on me some people are thinking of SupCom style gunships rather than vertical takeoff fighter planes when using the word VTOL... ?

Exactly the point I was making here.

Mike

?

The point you were making was "not every aircraft that can take of vertically needs to fly as slow as a SupCom style gunship" right?
Yes I agree, but this has nothing to do with the fact that we have a confusion about terminology here.

Technically SupCom gunships are VTOLs, but the more common concept of a VTOL is a fighter plane that can take of vertically but fly with very high speed (just kike all "normal" planes in SupCom). But apparently we don't all agree on that, and some people have a concept different from that one as their personal common concept...
So maybe we should first agree on the terminology before continuing the discussion.

Well gunships are like helicopters.

VTOL's are planes.

No, also helicopters are VTOLs... and SupCom gunships are no helicopters, but VTOLs...

Edit: notice that this is not the common concept of VTOLs but the actual classification

VTOL: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/VTOL

A picture of a VTOL: Link

A video game VTOL: http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y24/Wi ... 10VTOL.jpg

Every single aircraft in TA and SupCom is technically VTOL, but not all of them can hover. However, let's just classify them as such.

Now we are just confusing terminology.

Lets just stick with gunships and planes for the sake for not arguing over thus for anther bunch of pages because of how people classify different stuff.

The Terms aren't Wrong, but people are confused and assuming that VTOL is an all encompassing term when it's not, thus my references to the Harrier and V-22, which are characterized by the mix of Fixed-wing flight profiles but still have VTOL Capabilities.

Mike

This is exactly NOT confusing terminology. This was UNconfusing terminology.

And to talk about gunships and planes only neglects the actual topic, that is non-VTOL-planes vs. {VOTOLS} \ {SupCom style gunships and helicopters}

Never said it was confusing for you, but not all of us know every bloody acronym when it comes to military aircraft.

And I am with Knight with this one.

Neither do I? i just had that intuition about the terms and backed it up with the help of Wikipedia. You just need to read the first sentence in the English article. As this is pretty simple why do you suggest to use ambiguous terminology when the unambiguous terminology easily accessible.