Video of guy who mounted a turret on a jetpack shows a surprising feature
He previously made a real-life BB8.
James Bruton is an engineer and YouTube star who is known for recreating things we’ve all seen in movies, from a real-life BB-8 droid to an Iron Man suit, but Bruton’s latest creation is something very different.
Bruton has helped create a jetpack that has a turret on it with a surprising feature: It also in the direction you’re looking. It’s both an interesting application of engineering and a terrifying piece of high-speed killing machinery.
The jetpack was designed by Gravity Industries, and the company set the world record for the fastest jetpack flight in 2017 when it was flown over a lake in England at just over 32 mph.
Gravity apparently reached out to Bruton to design a turret that can be attached to the jetpack, and it is controlled by a helmet.
The gun is just a fully automatic Airsoft rifle, but as Gizmodo notes, this could be an effort to get military funding. It’s going to take a lot of money to further develop the jetpack and get it sold to the public, so Gravity could be attempting to get the attention of the military. Imagine a bunch of soldiers trying to shoot each other out of the sky.
The turret was made with 3D-printed parts that Bruton designed, and he decided to only allow the gun to move up and down because it would hit the person flying the jetpack in the head if it could move side to side. It can shoot single shots or continuous shots, and the trigger can also be disabled using what he calls “safe mode.”
While I would have loved to have a jetpack with an Airsoft gun on it when I was a boy and enjoyed harassing my sister, it seems pretty likely this kind of technology will make its way to combat zones, and that’s pretty terrifying. That said, many believe robots, rather than humans, will be fighting the wars of the future.
