Resembling a cast-iron uterus with whirring, razor-sharp dentata more than a jetpack proper, Andreas Petzoldt has spent the last decade perfecting every rocket lad's dream on his own dime.
Of course, Petzoldt's Monocopter is hardly the bronze, flame-belching backpack of the Rocketeer. It's a monstrous thing, weighing over 120 kilograms. It's what H.G. Wells might have envisioned the Kaiser's army using to invade England. It's a jet engine strapped to a fragile, easily crushed human torso.
It hasn't been tested yet, but Petzoldt promises that it will be better than the "rocket belt" system of human gravity-defiance, since a full tank of fuel will let a single person fly around for over thirty minutes. A proper jetpack has apparently never been created.
Of course, it's hard not to imagine the test flight. With great ebullience, Andreas soars into the heavens. He sneers at gravity with contempt, a spurned mistress, a whore who embraces all but him. But suddenly he hears a horrifying choke and shudder and a sickening vertigo creeping up from his genitalia and into his bowels as he plummets back down to the ground, strapped to over 200 pounds of highly-explosive rocket fuel and whirring metal blades.
Andreas’ Personal Flying Suit (“Monocopter”) Project [Technologie Entwicklung]
