Oh, I think an absurdly re-engined, bulbous-fendered, steam-punked '39 pickup looks 1000X more epic than a re-engined cop car.
BTW: My favorite color is blue. I’m not anxious to get into a disagreement over that also though.
Oh, I think an absurdly re-engined, bulbous-fendered, steam-punked '39 pickup looks 1000X more epic than a re-engined cop car.
BTW: My favorite color is blue. I’m not anxious to get into a disagreement over that also though.
Brutus is horribly impractical but magnificent just the same!
Royal Marines.
And I’m somewhat sceptical whether the Gravity jet pack generates enough lift to propel the average US cop and his equipment.
Insurgency low-tech solutions always outpace establishment high-tech.
For instance, those control/power wires to the hand jets look unarmored. A drone can be fitted with a cordless circular saw, these days…
“Now let me pull out my sidearm. Just gotta release the jet pack cuffs first, cut off fuel supply, aww crap they’re all getting away!”
Those guys are going to be suicide bombers holding a deadman’s switch. Though a drone might be cheaper, sometimes you have to thin the herd.
I could see ships protecting themselves from jet-pack assault by use of cheap wire criss-crossing the superstructure so as to ensnare the pilot.
Firehose. Ships have them anyway.
Or a confetti cannon showering them with something like chaff made of carbon fibres. Something along those lines.
I think we’ve discussed this already last year, and I think I tried to look up whether those little turbines are rated for rainy weather and didn’t find anything.
My guess is that they won’t be able to handle anything beyond a light drizzle.
My other guess is that even one turbine flaming out will make life very exciting for the operator, and two flaming out will result in rapid unscheduled splashdown or lithobreaking.
Other points are the heat signature they are bound to have and the noise they make. It wouldn’t be too hard to make drones that can home in on either or both.
Insurgency-style low-tech solutions in this case.
This is a beautiful looking plane, and if they can get it to work with the claimed 440 nm range that’s pretty decent for a lot of applications. Obviously it won’t be replacing long range jets anytime soon but the Cessna 152s that I used to fly had about the same range as that.
It was a stupid time in auto demand, too. Customers in the US wanted the opposite of what would improve mileage in the era of oil embargoes. Because sitting in gas lines all day is sooooo much fun.
The aptly-named Gremlin was one of the worst cars I ever had the displeasure of riding in. But hey, it averaged “18 mpg, depending upon the way you drive”.
“Simplify, then add lightness”
– Colin Chapman