Raider X Helicopter Brings Back Vietnam-Style Combat Missions in Most Ridiculous CGI

Records say America used no less than 12,000 various kinds of these machines during the war, and lost close to half of them during the fierce battles there. Those are numbers that are hard to forget, even by today's standards.

Today, although the variety of helos America is using for combat missions is quite large, such huge deployments are no longer to be seen. Yet that isn't stopping Lockheed Martin from envisioning a future when the U.S. would have to go back to the jungle, this time flying the brand new Raider X instead of Vietnam era's Huey or Snake.

The Sikorsky Raider X is planned as a successor to the Bell OH-58 Kiowa, an attack reconnaissance helicopter that left the U.S. without such a tool when it was retired about a decade ago. It will fight the Bell-made 360 Invictus to become the winner of the U.S. Army's Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft (FARA) program.

The Raider has been designed as a compound helicopter that uses a main propulsion system and an auxiliary one meant to provide extra thrust. It comes equipped with twin, counterrotating, coaxial rigid rotors on top and a pusher propeller at the rear.

The helo is powered by a General Electric (GE) turboshaft engine capable of developing up to 3,000 shaft horsepower, the same type of engine that will be deployed on the future iterations of the UH-60 Black Hawk and AH-64 Apache.

The helicopter, just like its competitor, was scheduled to conduct its first flight test evaluation this year, but as far as we know that didn't happen, and the test seems to have been pushed for some reason well into next year.

While we wait, Sikorsky's corporate overlord, Lockheed Martin, decided to give us a taste of how the Raider (in fact, a whole fleet of them) would look like in action.

A short, one-and-a-half-minute-long CGI video was put together, showing clear virtual Vietnam vibes: a densely packed jungle, armies of helos flying over the treetops, and soldiers running around under the green canopy.

Ridiculous as it seems, the video does give us a glimpse at the Modular Open System Architecture (MOSA) the Raider will use. This is a system that should allow the helicopter to be upgraded on a plug-and-play basis.

We also get to see how the helo will store weapons inside its main body and fire them, something that's quite different from how present-day attack helicopters do things today.

Below is the most recent Lockheed Raider video, but for comparison we've included below that a clip of the real-world prototype in the official presentation.