Machine Gun Jetpack

This was the final project for Modeling and Simulation of the Physical World. A partner and I based our project off of an xkcd What-if? article. The article explored whether or not a machine gun jetpack was feasible. We wanted to take it a step further and ask whether or not the jetpack would be able to “fly” or jump over a mountain, and which mountains it would be able to cross. There were a lot of generous assumptions made, including the idea that the machine gun would have to reload itself, and heat constraints are not taken into account in our model. Further, any run-of-the-mill machine gun will not do– such a jetpack requires a Russian naval anti-aircraft machine gun.

Satisfyingly, we found that there exists at least one mountain that you would be able to clear with a fully-loaded machine-gun jetpack: the Matterhorn, which is narrow enough to completely clear. Our jetpack can reach the peaks of many other mountains; however, these mountains are generally wide enough that our jetpack would not be able to clear one completely.

The modeling of our project was done in MATLAB.

A full outline of our project can be seen in our project poster below.

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