EF24 Bazelart

EF24 Bazelart is the name of a series of vehicles in the EDF games, first appearing in the original Monster Attack. The Air Raider can call for them in Earth Defense Force 2025 and Earth Defense Force 4.1: The Shadow of New Despair.

Pre-2025
The Bazelart (sometimes translated as Bazerato) appears pre-placed on certain maps in games up to and including 2017, with stats that vary according to the difficulty level, and can be used by any class. Unlike its later counterpart, it has infinite ammunition.

Games prior to 2017 used a different design for the Bazelart, while the version in 2017 was very similar to its incarnation in 2025. In the earlier games the Bazelart only had cannons, while in 2017 it can also fire pairs of guided missiles; as with other missile weapons, these simply go after the nearest enemy, having no lock-on system.

Description
The Bazelart is an agile and powerful attack helicopter, the most manoeuvrable of the three available to the Air Raider; it is the "fighter" to the EF31 Nereid's "bomber." All Bazelarts are armed with two weapons, a cannon of some type on their wingtips and something resembling a rocket or missile launcher, though the precise details of their armament vary depending on the model in question.

The gun weapons of the Bazelart, Bazelart Blaze and Bazelart Powered are called "machine guns." These weapons are very short ranged and have a single trigger to fire both weapons at once; the two ammo counters are purely cosmetic since there is no way for one gun to have a different ammunition count to the other. They are synchronised with their shots meeting at the weapon's maximum range, and deal very high damage with a very substantial reserve of ammunition.

The other possible gun weapon is found on the three with "Vulture" in the name. This weapon is referred to as the "Vulture Cannon" in the description and simply as "Laser Cannon" in the stat block; it is a very long-ranged, perfectly accurate and very powerful weapon that fires in five-shot bursts from both guns at the same time.

The second weapon of the Bazelart is either guided missiles or a "Twin Napalm Gun" which fires unguided incendiary rounds. Like all guided missile launchers in the two games, missile-armed Bazelarts lock on to targets using a red bounding box to indicate the lock-on search area. They seem to lock on to the central "origin bone" of an enemy's 3D model rather than their hitbox; for normal enemies this makes no difference, but on very large enemies like bosses it may need to be pointed at their approximate middle to actually get a lock. Like other guided weapons, their missiles cannot fire at all if they are not locked on. It is not particularly clear what method the game engine uses to determine what enemies to lock on to, but the player has little control over what things it chooses. Locking on does not require line of sight to the target; anything within the bounding box and within range will be targeted.

The Twin Napalm Gun fires a shotgun-like spread of six incendiary rounds in front of the helicopter; these work like the Ranger's Napalm weapons, creating an area of flames that burns for some time and deals damage-over-time, and will stick to anything it hits, being carried around if that thing moves.

Control and handling
Helicopters in the two games feature extremely strange handling. Rather than having buttons to alter height up and down like most videogames, there is no button to descend, and the ascend button functions by spinning up the rotors so that they generate lift, which gradually decreases if the ascend button is left alone as if the rotors are some kind of flywheel. The helicopter will only start to descend once the rotors have slowed down enough.

It is probably better to imagine them as hot-air balloons with the ascend button the equivalent of using the burner; even if the burner is off, the balloon will not descend by itself until the air in it has cooled down.

Helicopters are the only vehicles other than the SDL1 which are damaged by contact with scenery; this includes their rotors. Small scenery objects will cause minor damage to a helicopter as the rotors spin up, while having it wedged against the side of a building can prevent the rotors from turning at all. Therefore, it is necessary to request and land helicopters in clear spaces to avoid wasted credits or needless damage.

Exiting a helicopter in mid-air is possible since there is no such thing as fall damage; while it might be expected that the helicopter would be destroyed by such silly activity, it will actually continue to hover until its rotors spin down, and then descend vertically and land, not taking any damage unless it collides with something on the way down. It is also briefly possible to get back into the helicopter after exiting it since the circle is quite large: this can actually be useful, since it allows Vulture-type Bazelarts to save ammunition for their lasers by exiting to cut short the normal five-round burst.

It should also be noted that unless the player really wants to damage their wrist, it is best to turn vibration off when using a helicopter while playing 2025. The vibration from simply applying power to a helicopter's rotors is toned down significantly in 4.1.

Strategy
The first Bazelart is virtually useless since its handling is so poor and it takes so long to get off the ground, but this improves as the series goes on, with the final Bazelart Powered being quite responsive, if subject to the same weird control method all helicopters use. The Bazelarts have a large payload which equates to enormous potential damage; the Bazelart Powered actually has the highest potential damage of any single-seat vehicle in the game, with all of its ammunition equating to 960,000.

The gun-armed Bazelarts are close-support aircraft, their short range requiring they get among their targets to do real damage. They are thus not particularly suited to attacking enemies that can fight back; Spiders will take them down quickly on higher difficulties if the helicopter is the only thing for them to focus on, and a Deroy even faster if it starts using its lasers. However, they can be very effective if their manoeuvrability is used to its fullest when attacking ungainly and easily stunlocked enemies like Hectors or taking on a boss enemy. They have a very hard time dealing damage to Transport Ships or Earth Eaters, and bringing one to fight a Quadruped Fortress directly is simply foolishness.

Since they gain altitude quickly they are also effective against flying enemies, most of which are bad at dealing with enemies above them. Constantly moving sideways while attacking will mean most return fire misses its mark.

Laser-armed Bazelarts are excellent long-range direct-fire support, and those with Napalm Guns are very good at thinning out approaching swarms. Missile-armed Bazelarts can take on fairly tough foes and have significant splash damage for crowds, but their small number of locks means they are not much use against dispersed groups.

Normally a Bazelart can only lock one missile onto any given target, but as with other multi-lock systems, it can lock on to a Laser Guide Kit or Guide Beacon with all of its missiles at once. This allows it to be used to attack tough targets, though it requires close cooperation with a second Air Raider or pre-placement of Guide Beacons.

Variants
All Bazelarts have a crew capacity of 1 and cost 4,000 credits to drop. The series is unique, however, in that its different models do not have the same starting credits: the first three can be deployed at the start of a mission, but the Vulture 2 requires 200 more credits before it can first be deployed, while the Vulture F and Bazelart Powered each require 400 more.

Trivia

 * "Bazelart" is a brand of ping-pong bat made by an American company called Butterfly.
 * The older Bazelart design appears to the offspring of the forbidden love of a civilian light helicopter and an AH-1 Cobra.
 * The Bazelart in 2017, 2025 and 4.1 is based on the Longbow version of the AH-64 Apache, with a high tailboom and extended rear landing gear more like the cancelled AH-56 "Cheyenne" hybrid helicopter.