Also, if you are boarding the kind of vessel that makes a habit of surprising naval inspectors with incredibly lethal application of medium-arms fire, what stops them from shooting you while you float in... Or are screwing around with getting your gear off after you land.
This seems like a fun toy which is only useful in situations when nobody's looking to pick a fight with you.
And during wartime, I don't see this being at all useful. This isn't the eighteenth century, warships no longer perform boarding actions against opponents that are going to shoot back.
But yes, not really sure of the real world application of this in a military situation. It seems all you can do is fly, any effort to manipulate a weapon wearing these things seems like it would go poorly.
Best I can tell from the website, you can commission one via a "contact us with your enquiry" form but you can't buy one retail as such. Which is a shame because they look like fun.
> And during wartime, I don't see this being at all useful. This isn't the eighteenth century, warships no longer perform boarding actions
Exactly, this would be more for peacekeeping operations, the RM do a fair amount of anti-piracy, which is often/I suppose always, by the time they're involved, going to mean board & search & whatever else.
I don't think this video (on the OEM's YouTube channel no less) should be taken to mean it's the new SOP though! Just R&D/evaluation, not going to find the next best thing without trying any candidates.
I presume the Royal Marines know far more than me about such matters, but I just can't see the use. It's a soft target strapped to a small jet engine that seems liable to shred itself into shrapnel if it gets hit by small arms fire. I can't imagine it's pleasant to fly in the wind either, especially if the wind isn't constant.
Judging by the way they were flying, and that the maneuverability seems to largely come from those bits on their hands, it also doesn't seem particularly agile. You're not going to generate a lot of lateral force without the risk of snapping the operators wrist/forearm. Presuming there are hostiles on board the ship, they seem like they could rather easily take one of these down with some buckshot. Even if you don't get a lethal hit, the impact seems like it would likely make the operator lose control of the jetpack either from rotation or just from the sheer shock of being shot. It seems like they'd either slam into the ship (bad), or fall into the ocean at which point the turbines would disintegrate in the water like helicopter blades flinging shrapnel into the operator (also bad).
If I had to rank them from my armchair, I'd take a water-based boarding using launched rope ladders first, air-based boarding via rappelling from a helicopter second (assuming I knew how to do that) and this thing third. It has all the risks of getting shot down that a helicopter does (except that it doesn't even take an RPG to take down the jetpack), combined with still having to make a water-based entry.
The enemy are likely inside the ship. So you would need to board and then go into the ship and fight. I can't imagine a drone being able to do that soon.
As the tech gets better there could absolutely be a case for tactical assaults using this kind of tech.
These make wall defences irrelevant.