who needs AA defense with guns that size in can fire shells over the horizons like a battleship does.

bet even other aircraft wont even come close to this thing when armed

the sort of aircrft we wish to see on Expendables 3

Good question.

I am still trying to come up with a name for it, this being an alternate universe I try to avoid using labels coming from our world like 'nuclear fission'.

Its power would be above a nuclear fusion engine and perhaps below anti-matter engine in terms of power output. Either way it enables deep blue water operations that allows it to last out in the middle of the ocean for as long as the crew's food supply runs, i.e. like a nuclear-powered sub patrolling the ocean looking for trouble. The massive power output from the engine would also overcome the issue of powering a hypervelocity gun lugging six foot caliber shells.

The issue of 'personal' defense is more complicated. In this alternate universe, one can expect bullets and explosive shells as well as proximity fuses, and from the enemy, these things and including high powered lasers and dumb rockets. Heat-seeking and fire-and-forget missiles are relatively uncommon due to the long running nature of the war making repeated use of expensive expendable 'smart' ammunition prohibitive.

Before this flying battleship, navy engagements involved air to air attacks. However even if the Allies won air-to-air engagements, their conventional aircraft couldn't sink enemy ships which were armed with gigantic ship based AA laser defenses that would vaporize them out of the sky while their standard navy guns would be used in combination with the lasers to severely damage friendly ships attempting to sink them with their weapons.

The Hammerhead was built to fill in this gap as an airborne battleship platform to shoot from a higher altitude. The Hammerhead's huge size and immense engine power allows installation of special armor that's too heavy for other aircraft that weakens and dissipates the lasers while also taking damage from most battleship shells. The side guns and tail gun pod attack ground targets but can also fire at incoming aircraft below the azimuth covered by the rotors.

The Hammerhead's weak point would be attacks from above and behind the azimuth of the tail gunner from interceptor jets based off enemy aircraft carriers, but its huge blades and massive rotor shafts can withstand up to 200 mm explosive shells which allows for more time to get away from a bad situation.

In ad-hoc 'surprise find' attacks it functions like the mission 'Black Cats' from CoD: World at War, and works in 3-unit teams (shown here: [link] ). The inaccurate part in this drawing is the close proximity for dramatic effect, otherwise their main six foot caliber guns firing hyper-velocity shells allow targeting from afar as fire support, reducing damage experienced by front-line units. However they can't target over the horizon or beyond visual range unless given coordinates by a friendly interceptor.

They are almost invincible once they have friendly interceptors to cover the skies above them. Despite their toughness they function best with a combined air force assault like any other unit.