the.com/gunship
A helicopter that decided peace talks were someone else's problem.
means A heavily armed military helicopter or aircraft built to attack ground targets with cannons, rockets, or missiles.
from A straightforward compound of 'gun' and 'ship' — the second half inherited from naval language, where any vessel-of-war got called a 'ship' regardless of what it floated on. The word originally described armed naval vessels, then got borrowed by air forces: in WWII and especially the Vietnam War, 'gunship' came to mean a helicopter or converted cargo plane (like the AC-47, nicknamed 'Puff the Magic Dragon') stuffed with weapons and sent to rain fire from above.
- origin
- Vietnam War turned troop transports into flying gun platforms
- apache design
- built to survive hits that would down normal helicopters
- rotor logic
- hovers to aim, unlike jets that must keep moving
- slang drift
- now means any heavily armed vehicle, air or ground