The AC-130 is my favorite plane.
They're neat, but I do find them to be quite Spooky.
I'll see myself out-
You know what I don’t like about them? They’re kind of a symbol of American arrogance and bullying.
It’s only useful where there is zero AAA and zero threat from enemy fighters. It’s a cargo plane - it packs a wallop, of course, but you use it when “the other guy” is a bunch of dudes running around on the ground with no chance to fight back.
The fact that we have them in inventory says a LOT about the types of wars we’ve been fighting for the past 40 years.
(Super unpopular opinion - the A-10 is not much better, but at least it has some genuine anti-armor capabilities.)
It has more to do with the American war strategy in general: air supremacy is just the plan, and America has a lot of tools to root out AA and destroy enemy air forces. Compare to someone like Russia who is explicitly choosing not to dominate the airspace and relying on artillery for its fire support, and as a result has different focuses.
It doesn't have zero defense against AA- as a commenter upthread pointed out, this picture is literally showing it launching flares against heat-seeking missiles- but it's not something that's designed to work only when fighting non-peer forces, it's essentially capitalizing on the air supremacy that other components of American forces will be creating.
The A-10 was obsolete on arrival; The only thing that’s kept it “effective” is the AGM-65 Maverick, which almost anything can use now.
Apache Helos, F-16s, and tossing Hellfires from drones do the same job a whole lot better.
All of that fiery stuff is actually defensive. Those are flares that are launched en masse to divert incoming heat seaking missiles. There's usually a bunch of antiradar chaff getting launched too but it isn't very visible. So it would be providing a bonus to Armor Class. The effect is sometimes called the "angel flare" because from head on all the fire and smoke patterns resemble angel wings (this mage is zoomed in to much to show the full pattern).
That could probably be a sick way to flavour some protection spell. Casting shield by shooting out an array of flares would look awesome.
In a sense, that’s almost what Mirror Image is with visual targeting.
