Editing Combat Aircraft (section)

==Propulsion==
*'''Propellers''': The first means of powered flight, propellers were used up until after WWII for all aircraft; by then Jet engine technology had been developed, which became the dominant means of propulsion due to being faster and having a higher flight ceiling. However, propellers are still used on certain kinds of heavy aircraft that do not require to travel at higher speed, as they have better efficency. Drones are also usually equipped with propellers as jet drones are unnecessary overkill against most drone targets (those being countries with shitty old AA equipment and insurgents). Most propellers engines today are actually a hybrid of traditional propeller engines and jet engines, wherein they operate in the same principle as turbofans but use the generated thrust to spin propeller blades instead of pushing air out at high speed. There are two big classes of propeller aircraft:
** '''Tractor aircraft''': the propeller(s) face forward and pull the airplane through the air. Most commonly seen configuration with the motor either in the nose (if single) or on the wings (if multiple). Simple, proven, efficient, has worked for over a century now. No need to reinvent the wheel, unless really necessary.
**'''Pusher aircraft''': Yang to the tractor's Yin, the propeller faces backward and pushes the airplane forward. One can go into the (dis-)advantages of both for entire books, but pusher is nowadays mostly used in two cases: very small aircraft/ultralights that would otherwise be simply unbalanced, or airplanes/drones that need a clean nose for visibility (and weaponry).
***'''Push-pull configuration''': the red-haired stepchildren of aviation, a few designs had both one (or more) tractor and pusher engine(s) installed. Most well-known (so to speak) is the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cessna_O-2_Skymaster Cessna O-2 Skymaster].  
*'''Jets''': the main engines used on most aircraft today: civilian ones tend to favor fuel economy and engines with high bypass ratios (put simply, only a fraction of the air passes through the combustion chambers proper and gets overheated, but the mass of the mix at the back provides a decent amount of thrust for less fuel), where military ones often have a post-combustion system for when you really need that extra burst of thrust (at the cost of being fuel guzzlers, but hey...) A few specialized variants exist:
:**'''Ramjets''': designed specifically for use at high speed by using the speed of the aircraft itself to suck in air, instead of having to use its own power to suck air in with turbofans. These are used on some models of interceptors and recon craft.
:**'''VTOL''': Verticals Takeoff and Landing. Jets with VTOL can redirect thrust downward so that they don’t need to use as much runway space, allowing them to deploy from smaller aircraft carriers and other non traditional runways. VTOL consumes a lot of extra fuel, so it’s only present on very specific aircraft and only engaged when necessary.
*'''Rotors''': Essentially a propeller turned upwards. While not as fast as fixed-wing craft, their ability to hover allows them to takeoff and land from any flat ground as small as the aircraft itself, as well as provide continuous fire support to ground forces. A traditional helicopter requires an additional tail rotor to prevent the helicopter from spinning out of control, but other systems include a secondary lift rotor spinning in the opposite direction.
:**'''Tiltrotor''': a hybrid rotorcraft that can transition from hover to propeller modes by rotating the engines, as used on the [[wikipedia:V-22 Osprey|V-22 Osprey]], though this has proven to be quite tricky to implement for a number of aerodynamic and structural reasons, though it seems to have paid off. Also tough on rookie pilots due to essentially being both a prop plane and a helicopter at the same time.
:**'''Ornithopter''':While no maned military Ornithopter has taken flight, it shows up enough in fantasy to be worth a quick mention. While a helicopter works by spinning the wing, (that's what "''helico''" means), an Ornithopter works via flapping. While unworkable for manned craft as a whole, smaller unmanned designs do have potential.
:**'''Compound Helicopter''': The Tiltrotor isn’t the only hybrid helicopter system out there; the Conpound helicopter combines the top rotor of the traditional helicopter, with a propeller in the rear for forward thrust, as well as small wingtips for added lift. This allows the helicopter to fly forward more quickly and reduces the load on the top rotor. So far this has only been used on experimental aircraft.
*'''Rockets''': Only one rocket-powered fighter exists, the [[Wikipedia:Me 163 Komet|Me 163 Komet]], which proved very difficult to control and had to glide down to land after its fuel was spent. However, it was extremely fast and had a very high flight ceiling. Rockets are mostly used nowadays as disposable takeoff assistance called RATO or JATO, usually for heavy aircraft on short runways.
*'''Balloon''': airships were only used in combat during WWI, when air defense were still quite primitive. The infamous Zeppelins in particular carried out bombing raids in Britain, making them quite a terrifying sight to behold. Even bulletholes did little to stop them, as rigid airships have the same internal pressure as atmosphere, causing them to leak hydrogen too slowly to matter. However, as the [[wikipedia:Hindenburg Disaster|Hindenburg disaster]] quite definitively showed, hydrogen airships have a nasty tendency of exploding if even a small amount of static discharge is present, causing them to disappear from warfare altogether, with the exception of the "Barrage balloon", which is more like a flying landmine since the cables it carries can cause damage to low flying aircraft (ground attackers), which could be pretty nasty at night (at least one German bomber was quite literally sliced in half during the Battle of Britain). Even after replacing the hydrogen with helium, airships proved too slow and vulnerable to be of much use compared to newer and more advanced aircraft. They saw some use as submarine chasers and to provide RADAR to Coast Guard units in WW2, and experimentally as "airborne aircraft carriers". The latter of which mostly did nothing but demonstrate how stupidly difficult the entire concept was to implement.