Is it ever used for troop insertion? It can carry a squad or two

It can, but a Hip can drop off way more troops. Hinds are much more useful backing up the hips.

Pretty sure they ferried ground troops a few times when the Soviets were in Afghanistan, particularly small squads of Spetznaz

Hinds can penetrate a bigger load deeper than the hip, I think

>>58042250 (OP)

I’ve been in the back of one. It says it can fit 8 troops, but that’s only if they’re 5’3” and naked with no equipment

>>58042250 (OP)

I read once that the early versions, when carrying weapons and troops, were unable to hover due to the added weight. 

How are you going to insert troops with a helicopter that can't hover and needs the lift from forward flight? 

And if you can only insert troops when not carrying weapons, then that defeats the entire purpose of a troop carrying gunship and you're better of with a dedicated transport helicopter.

booba

So you are saying it can fit around 16 russian troops?

Neither fish nor fowl. Incapable of realistically transporting troops, wasted space for a dedicated attack helicopter. Should have gone with a Huey-style of doing both, but not at the same time.

>It can, but a Hip can drop off way more troops. Hinds are much more useful backing up the hips.

That was the rub, one Hip could carry 2-3 times the troops / equipment and the helicopter costs a fraction the price. So you send in a bunch Hip's with a few Hind's to cover them, at that point the amount of men the Hind carries is so small it isn't even worth the risk of landing them or interrupting the covering fire they provide just to drop off a few more. 

If they designed the Hind with more of a carry role in mind, lightened up on the armor, removed one of the rocket pod hardpoints, the fixed 30mm cannon and used the weight saved to increase the carrying capacity to 12-16 men then maybe the gunship role would have worked out, like a Soviet Blackhawk, as it is though, it's just an attack helicopter with a mostly useless troop bay.

having trained on a hind, one theory involves landing on the place you expended the rockets at for insertion.. I say theory correctly)

kek'd

I mean the logic is there, Russia was one of the early adopters of the ifv concept so it makes sense they'd try to apply the idea to aircraft. Especially after seeing the high attrition American helicopters were suffering at the time. Of course the reality is you get an attack helicopter that's about as agile as my late grandmother and a troop transport with the space of a shoebox

>I mean the logic is there, Russia was one of the early adopters of the ifv concept so it makes sense they'd try to apply the idea to aircraft.

Really it's cost where the whole concept falls apart. Putting 6-8 men in an armored ground vehicle with a lot of firepower is a great idea but to transition that to an aircraft and the build / operating cost goes up by a factor of ten.

It is useful for evac

Even if that was true, couldn't the troops still parachute out?

I’ve ridden on a MI-17 but without cool external pods.

russians are human equivalent of garbage. give a fucking chimpanzee a tank to drive. at the end of the day he's just a chimpanzee.
