User:Izanami/Archive

The Kawazaki Mi-85 (: 河崎 き-85) is a large helicopter gunship, attack helicopter and low-capacity troops transport with room for eight passengers. It is produced by Kawazaki Heavy Industries and has been operated sine 1985 by the Yamatai Imperial Army, Marines and other export nations.

The Mi-85 has its roots in the Gran Altiplano. In 1981, an Mi-24 was clandestinely stolen and smuggled out of Songthom by Yamataian intelligence as part of Operation Tsubaki, a wide-reaching attempt by Great Game-era Yamatai to study and document communist equipment to train its own forces for a future war. Seeing the potential of the design, the Mi-24 was turned over to Kawazaki with the task of generating a new domestic attack helicopter with similar capabilities to bolster the fleet of that the Imperial Army operated. While externally similar to the Mi-24 in shape and appearance, the Mi-85 has been almost entirely redesigned and is built with entirely Yamataian components.

The reporting code of the Mi-85 is Hakama. Yamataian pilots often refer to the aircraft as the "flying tank" or "crocodile".

Development
Operation Tsubaki was a wide-reaching global-scale operation by the Yamatai Imperial Intelligence Agency, with occasional cooperation from other Three Powers Alliance and later HECO intelligence agencies, lasting from the Hinomoto Crisis to roughly 1994. The goal of the operation was to catalogue and obtain as much communist hardware as possible to be able to test and create realistic training standards for the supposed total global war with communism that the Yamataian government predicted and feared. Captured communist equipment was assigned to the Fuji Tactical Training School, a clandestine Imperial Army unit that exists to this day, which acts as an during military exercises using a mixture of real and VISMOD communist equipment.

During Operation Tsubaki, the IIA obtained communist equipment through multiple vectors, the most common of which were purchases through third party nations in the developing world. The Mi-24, long admired by the Imperial Army since encountering very early Mi-24As during the Hinoan War and through subsequent surveillance of communist forces, was considered one of the "crown jewels", with a high priority to capture a unit. In 1980, the chance came when Songthom purchased a shipment of Mi-24s and began to use them in anti-insurgent operations along the western border. During this period, the IIA was already involved in the region, arming and funding the ethnic separatist movements in the nation. Increasing drops of man-portable surface-to-air missiles to the local rebels in return for intelligence on the Mi-24, the IIA received word that a Mi-24 had been shot down relatively intact by one of the rebel groups, and immediately moved to secure the asset.

In a classified operation, the IIA extracted the wrecked helicopter from Songthom and returned it to Yamatai, where it was entirely disassembled and examined by FTTS and Division 146, the Imperial Military's helicopter research and development branch. The aircraft was later reassembled and repaired to working condition using parts cannibalised from a purchased from Outer Heaven under Operation Tsubaki, and flight and combat ability tests were rigorously carried out. By the summer of 1983, testing had concluded and the Imperial Army expressed a desire to create an aircraft similar to the Mi-24 for frontline use. Kawazaki won the contract, narrowly beating Mitsuhishi by cost.

Kawazaki's engineers redesigned the entire aircraft based on the specifications and data gathered by the military testing, barely touching the original Mi-24 at all, which currently resides in the Kamikaku Aviation Museum. In late 1984, the new helicopter, then known as the Kawazaki Ji-24, was unveiled to the Imperial Army and Marines to great fanfare, beating the original Mi-24 in an organised demonstration in all areas except projected unit cost. The aircraft was accepted for purchase as the Ki-85, with 200 units ordered in 1984.