Military transport plane



The Lockheed C-130 Hercules is a four engine turboprop military transport aircraft for transporting troops.

The Combat Talon is a variant of the C-130 Hercules transport aircraft and was used during the Virtuous Mission to transport Naked Snake and his FOX support team to Tselinoyarsk. The name implies that the aircraft is supposed to be an MC-130 Combat Talon equipped with the weaponry suite used by the earliest versions of the AC-130A gunship. It was marked with "000", indicating that the Combat Talon used during the Virtuous Mission was an experimental aircraft. Because the Virtuous Mission was a no-support single plane mission, the Combat Talon also utilized various highly sophisticated sensors, including systems for gathering weather information. Being an MC-130, the aircraft is equipped with the Fulton Recovery System which allows personnel to be picked up by the plane, using a balloon attached to them. The Combat Talon is armed with two 20mm Vulcan rotary guns and two 40mm Bofors repeating cannons, which gave it more than enough power to hold its own against a battalion of tanks. It was also installed with a passive thermal night-vision device.

The Combat Talon later began mass production in 1966, two years after the Virtuous Mission and Operation Snake Eater.

The fortress state of Zanzibar Land possessed various C-130 gunships in its arsenal, during the late 1990s. In December 1999, a C-130 Hercules was used to transport Solid Snake into Zanzibar Land, from which he commenced a HAHO jump.

Behind the scenes
In early advertisements, specifically one for the first version of Metal Gear Online included in Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence, the MC-130 Combat Talon appears within a storm during a full motion video, before the camera focuses on the FOX logo, which then becomes the Kojima Productions logo.''