The fun thing about a jet/thruster-propelled Osprey is that it’s now even worse at its job than the prop-driven one.
For context, the osprey was designed as a troop transport alternative to helicopters that would have the speed of a fixed-wing aircraft but be capable of vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) like a helicopter. And they’re a nightmare.
The tiltrotor design creates so much down-draft in VTOL/hover mode that in anything but ideal landing conditions, they kick up so much dirt and debris that it blinds the pilot, the troops they’re moving, and any other craft nearby. Trying to mitigate the visibility problem by fast-roping troops to the ground from slightly higher up also proved problematic because the prop wash can rip people right off the rope.
The effect is so powerful that it can knock disembarking troops off their feet and door-gunners have to fight it to keep their guns from being pinned against the fuselage. Use of the Osprey for water rescue had to be abandoned because it could force whoever is being rescued underwater.
From everything I’ve heard, the osprey actually combines the fixed-wing craft’s power and speed with the helicopter’s intense desire to crash, kill everything onboard, and litter the countryside with debris.
This version is really funny to me because unless it’s a future with radically different tech, jet engines would add blast and burning damage to all of those scenarios. I’m no engineer but I think if you tried to land or take off on anything but a reinforced surface, you’d displace a few cubic meters of topsoil, asphalt, or loose rock every time. If it’s picking up or dropping people off, I could see having to cut the engines to keep from roasting them alive or showering them with flying debris.
You’re a colonial marine on final approach. The ship swoops dramatically into the LZ. The light to disembark turns green, and is immediately sandblasted into hot brown obscurity as the ramp door opens. You shuffle towards the tail of the craft, trying to brush petrol- smelling grit from the lenses of your IR goggles. You sprint down the ramp, straight into the sizzling 36" furrow ditch-witched into the earth by the ship’s engines. Rounds in your pack cook off like popcorn as the ship lifts off, executes a breathtaking acrobatic turn, and is scattered to the wind by a second Osprey.
If it’s just a personal craft, going from port to port, if it’s an enclosed, pressurized, heat-shielded fuselage, all that is going to be less of a factor.
The art is still really cool. I’m also imagining our current administration looking at the Osprey, deciding it’d be 200% sicker with jets, making a show of landing one on the WH lawn, incinerating a squad of marines, and browning-out in a cloud of dirt and burning grass before cartwheeling into the Home Depot Ballroom/Führerbunker.
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