Thanks to Louis Wu at HBO for pointing out that Ensemble Studios have posted more details on the UNSC Sparrowhawk. Here’s the lowdown:

Known more readily as just “Hawk” the Sparrowhawk is a formidable air to ground armor busting support aerodyne. The Hawk is still being assessed by command before full production starts while engineers are still working on an experimental propulsion system that has led to failures in the field making the future of this vehicle uncertain. The Hawk first saw actual combat against the Covenant on the surface of Harvest in the final months of that campaign.

For those of you (like me) that don’t know what an “aerodyne” is, Wikipedia defines it as:

An aerodyne is a heavier-than-air aircraft which derives lift from motion, as opposed to an aerostat which uses buoyancy (such as a balloon) to fly.

So, it’s a fancy word for plane, then 🙂

There’s also a new desktop version of the image available here in various resolutions. From this it’s clearer that what I thought were rocket pods are more like missiles or bombs.

Over at the official Halo Wars website there’s a recent forum post that gave an update about some Microsoft bigwigs that came to see a playable version of Halo Wars. Since the post went up there’s been an image being ‘decrypted’ at the end of the post. The image is finally fully visible, and it has revealed one of the new vehicles that will appear in the game – the UNSC Sparrowhawk.

This looks like a relative of the Pelican but designed more for offensive duties – a bit like a futuristic Apache helicopter. In the image you can see that the vehicle has a chin-mounted gun, two double-barrelled cannons on wing mounts, and three rocket pods under each wing too. It’s not clear how much elevation these vehicles can get – perhaps they’ll hover more than fly.

I’m beginning to really look forward to Halo Wars. I like RTS games, and had a great time with Age of Empires, which Ensemble also made. There’s no release date mentioned yet for it, but it sounds like they’re making good progress.