Support Chinook (BTD6)

"Abilities: Drops lives and cash crates, or can pick up and redeploy most Monkey types."

- In-game description

Support Chinook is the fourth upgrade of Path 2 for the Heli Pilot in Bloons TD 6. Similarly to its Bloons TD 5 counterpart, Support Chinook adds two new abilities: the Reposition Tower Ability and the Crate Drop Ability.

It costs $10,200 on Easy, $12,000 on Medium, $12,960 on Hard, and $14,400 on Impoppable.

Appearance
Support Chinook turns the blue helicopter into a blue Chinook helicopter with three frontal windows (unlike in BTD5's Chinooks, which have only one front window) and twin guns (quad guns with 1-4-0 or 2-4-0) at the front, along with three small rounded windows on each side of the helicopter. Unlike games in the BTD5 generation, the pilot of the BTD6 Support Chinook is not visible.

There is also a black-orange variant of the Support Chinook that briefly appears when removing certain obstacles. It is a Support Chinook that carries no guns, has orange windows and white crossed sign on its sides.

Abilities
The Support Chinook has two different abilities available, more than almost all towers with abilities. One of these abilities alternates between giving cash or lives, while the other ability can reposition most types of towers to a different location.

Note: As there are no official names for the two different abilities, unofficial names are assigned to each of the two abilities, though Ninja Kiwi has confirmed "Redeploy Ability" as the name of the ability that does tower pickup.

Supply Crate Ability
Every Support Chinook's Crate Ability has two different crates that will be spawned: a Cash Crate and a Health Crate.

The cash crate will give $1,800, while the med crate will give 10 lives. In Deflation Mode, it will cause the Chinook to produce only med crates, since income generation is banned in Deflation Mode.

The rate at which the supply crate ability (and the supply crates of the succeeding upgrade, Special Poperations) dispenses lives decreases immensely if the new total number of lives surpasses at least 1000 lives. Chinooks only give 1 life per crate in this scenario.

Unlike the Bloons TD 5 Mobile series, there is an initial cooldown before the Support Chinook is able to deploy its first crates.

The cooldown for the Supply Crate ability is 90 seconds. Additionally, each Support Chinook's crate ability can only be used up to 3 times per round, and all Supply Crate abilities disable after 3 minutes from the start of a round.

Redeploy Ability
The Redeploy Ability is the ability that allows the Support Chinook to move towers to a new location. Upon activation, the screen will pop up with a menu for moving a tower. Most towers are able to be moved, but there are a number of towers that cannot be moved. Upon moving the selected movable tower to a new spot, the Support Chinook will move (even when set to Lock in Place) towards the selected tower to reposition that tower to a new spot. The footprint of the tower to be moved is ignored while a new location is being selected.

The list of towers that cannot be moved include:
 * All Banana Farms
 * All Monkey Villages
 * Sun Temples
 * The True Sun God, including the Vengeful True Sun God variant
 * Aircraft Carrier and Carrier Flagship
 * All temporary towers
 * All Monkey Ace landing bases
 * All Heli Pilot landing bases
 * All Paragons
 * Portable Lake
 * Other players' towers in Co-Op Mode

The cooldown for the Redeploy Ability is 60 seconds.

Summary
Support Chinook handles with utility that most towers tend to lack, being able to providing lives and tower repositioning utility. It is somewhat cheaper than it did in BTD5, making it a little more useful overall. Its use on CHIMPS Mode is still viable, with high usage on harder maps such as Muddy Puddles and Quad.

Tips

 * Crosspathing for Support Chinook doesn't matter much, so base the crosspathing from Downdraft or for going to Special Poperations.
 * Although it cannot produce cash in CHIMPS, the Support Chinook is still useful in CHIMPS because of how useful the Reposition Ability is.
 * Support Chinook can still attack while using the Reposition Ability. Although small, this makes a difference on certain challenges.
 * It can move the Permanent Brew so it can boost more towers, as selling it removes all current boosts from the tower.

Bugs
The Support Chinook has been notorious for being able to do "illegal" things such as selling towers in no-selling challenges, including C.H.I.M.P.S., where selling is disabled. This is mainly due to its reposition ability that sometimes confuses the games logic of redeploying towers.


 * If the reposition ability is used, but the tower is not moved, the player can move a tower without using the cooldown. This bug has been known to occur since 1.0 and still occurs as of version 14.0.
 * If the reposition ability is used to move a land tower onto water using an arctic wind ice monkey, and the ice monkey is sold during the process, the arctic wind effect moves to the centre of the map and the tower appears to be floating on the water.
 * If the Chinook tries to move a tower next to a super monkey and the super monkey upgrades to a Sun Temple, so the temple's footprint blocks the tower's placement, the game crashes as the Chinook picks up the tower. If the Chinook was carrying the tower when the super monkey upgrades to the Sun Temple, the tower instead gets sold.
 * If the Chinook tries to move a tower to the very edge of the map it will crash the game.

Sounds
When activating Supply Crate Ability:
 * [Crate dropping]
 * [Cash collecting]
 * [Lives collecting]

When activating Redeploy Ability:
 * [Helicopter flying]
 * [Picking up towers]
 * [Dropping off towers]

Trivia

 * The BTD6 upgrade icon depicts just a Chinook, but the BTD5 upgrade icon depicts a shadow of a Chinook picking up a crate plus green arrows side to side from the crate.
 * Compared to the upgrade portraits in BTD5 generation games, the rotors appear smaller in the BTD6 upgrade portrait.