A material example

[yvannairie]

(Now available on Tumblr.)

What brought this on was me talking to Bri about medical frames -- how medical flight frames are a tiny minority and out of them the majority of them are rotaries. Which, y'know, makes sense because in the real world, medical jets aren't... exactly practical. Helicopters can take off and land in a far greater variety of places, they're far more stable and flexible and for human purposes, their carry capacity... is fine... but

But.

When you think about it, most rotaries we see aren't particularly more flexible with where an how they can fly -- VTOL is largely standard, even for big shuttleframes (although as I've argued elsewhere, that's probably just when they've got light loads) -- and also most rotaries aren't big enough to do medevac either way, acting more as field medics like their grounder counterparts. In that sense medijets make way more sense in that role -- they're faster and have an easier time getting around, even while grounders still beat them out in sturdiness and evac ability.

And that's already quite interesting until you put it together with how there aren't many civillian jets in general. Smaller airframes are almost uniformly soldiers, to the degree to which medics and scientists with airframes are pointed out as being a thing that is Consistently Weird in-universe. So, does this imply that rotaries -- many of whom are also warframes, let's be clear -- are considered a more "civillian" class of aiframes than fixed-wings? There must be some interesting interactions there also with how shuttle and tanker frames are considered "less ideal" fliers.

But at the same time... rotaries probably have a much easier time operating in occluded areas, as they're not nearly as reliant on radar and tacnav as flightframes whose cruising speeds are so high as to be unsafe. On an open front -- the kind of fighting you'd expect aerial frames to mostly engage in -- rotaries objectively the worse choice over jetframes for medics, but that kind of just leaves aerial and seeker units without any medical support.

Is that a cultural thing? Or is that also simply practical?

There's interesting things out there beyond the Doylist explanations.