Jump Jet Pack

'See you on the bounce, trooper!'

— Johnny Rico, Starship Troopers 3: Marauder

A device that helps propel its user forward, backward, etc. quickly. Unlike a Jet Pack, it doesn't grant flight, but it can help jumping In a Single Bound, Double Jump, hovering in the air temporarily, slowing descent, or being used in a Dash Attack or Video Game Dashing. Sometimes a Jet Pack designed for use in low gravity can be used as a Jump Jet Pack while on earth, or vice versa.

In most video games, the Jump Jet Pack has a fuel meter that only replenishes when it is not in use.

Sub-Trope of Jet Pack.

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Examples

Anime and Manga

• Kill la Kill: Senketsu has these, along with his Jet Pack form Senketsu Shippu.
• Gundam
  • Mobile Suit Gundam: A mainstay on almost all ground-based Mobile Suits, aside from a few exceptions. Given that most space-based suits are designed to be usable within an atmosphere, a number of them can use their thrusters for this purpose.
  • In SD Gundam Force, this is Captain Gundam's default backpack. His Mid-Season Upgrade consists of jets that can actually help him fly.

Films — Animated

• The Mobile Infantry have Jump Jet Packs that finally get used to their full potential in Starship Troopers: Traitor of Mars for combat drops, quick getaways, and mid-air boarding.

Films — Live-Action

• Interstellar. Small rockets are worn as gauntlets on the spacesuits, and are used to move in bounds down a steep icy slope and then as an Improvised Weapon when one astronaut gets into hand-to-hand combat with the other.

Literature

• Accel World:
  • Due to being confined to a wheelchair in real life, Sky Raker manifested the Gale Thruster - a high-speed Jet Pack with an operational time of a few seconds. Her habit of using this to launch herself and her allies behind enemy lines, combined with her considerable strength, earned her the Red Baron nickname of "The ICBM". However, she eventually became dissatisfied with this and obsessed with obtaining true Flight, to the point of breaking friendships and cutting off her avatar's legs in an attempt to sharpen her will. This lead to her earning a second nickname: "Icarus".
  • When Silver Crow, the first flying avatar, goes into a Heroic BSoD over the loss of his wings, Raker lends him the Gale Thruster as a substitute; by channeling his dreams of flight through the Thruster, Crow is able to recharge its energy meter at will, allowing it to fly continuously. Afterwards, Crow returns the favour by flying Raker to the edge of the atmosphere, showing her that her powers are really meant for flying through space, far higher than his wings will ever reach.
• Robert A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers: the powered armor used by the Mobile Infantry had "jump jets" that acted like this. When a trooper tried to jump high his suit automatically cut in the jets to send him high into the air, then cut in again to allow a soft landing.
• Combined with Minovsky Physics in the 1928 pulp novel Armageddon 2419 A.D. (which later inspired Buck Rogers). Inertron is a substance with "reverse weight" (anti-gravitational properties), so that a person carrying an amount of inertron equal to most of his weight can travel rapidly across country in long leaps with the aid of a "jumper" (rocket motors encased in inertron blocks and strapped to the back).
• The Four Horsemen Universe: The CASPers used by human mercenaries are equipped with jump jets that work much like the ones in Starship Troopers, letting CASPer pilots jump tall buildings in a single bound as well as launch paratrooper attacks without needing a parachute.

Live-Action TV

• In an episode of Alias, Sidney uses a thruster pack attached to a creeper (a board with wheels, like an auto mechanic uses) in order to escape quickly after conducting some sabotage on a rocket about to ignite.
• In Kamen Rider Fourze, Fourze himself uses a rocket pack while transformed to increase his jumps and slow his falls, occasionally being able to hover long enough for an aerial attack. However, he has to rely on the Rocket Switch for true sustained flight until he can use Cosmic States.

Tabletop Games

• Standard equipment available to armored and unarmored infantry as well as the humongous mecha of the setting in BattleTech; BattleMech "jump jets" are usually an integral part of the design, but can be pod-mounted on OmniMech frames, and oversized limited-use external jump packs (typically used for a quick drop from an airborne carrier, then discarded after touching ground) are likewise available. Jump jets also exist for conventional vehicles — the iconic example being the Star League's (in)famous Kanga hovertank —, but never really entered mass production; the landings tend to be too rough on the suspension.
• Warhammer 40,000 has two different rule sets for models with rockets that don't allow true flight:
  • Infantry equipped with Jump Packs, such as Assault Marines, Ork Stormboyz, or Chaos Raptors, are able to make great rocket-assisted leaps over terrain, making them excellent assault troops, while the same systems usually allow such troops to make safe landings from an airborne (or spaceborne) deployment, granting them the Deep Strike ability. The same ruleset can also be applied to creatures with more traditional wings, such as smaller Tyranid flyers or Chaos monsters, as well as the Eldar Swooping Hawks aspect warriors' technological wings. On the topic of the Eldar, they're advanced enough to grant this ability to their titans, allowing the foot-tall Revenant Titan model to make 36" leaps across the tabletop, potentially right onto enemy units.
  • Infantry operating under the Jet Packs rule, primarily Tau battlesuits but also some units like Eldar Warp Spiders, have flexibility at the cost of raw power, and effectively split up their jump move. Rather than making one 12" leap, they can instead make a 6" hop that ignores terrain, shoot in the Shooting Phase, then make another 6" jump in the Assault Phase, allowing them to break line-of-sight and avoid return fire. They also typically enjoy the Deep Strike rule as well.

Video Games

• MEC Troopers from the XCOM: Enemy Unknown expansion can be upgraded with Jetboots that let them jump to higher terrain.
• The titular playable character from Atomic Robo-Kid have jet thrusters built under his feet, which allows him to float in the air by repeatedly hitting the jump button, but doesn't allow him to fly.
• Automated Simulations' Star Warrior, which was based on Starship Troopers. The player character's power armor had a Jump subsystem that allowed him to jump 10 spaces forward, regardless of the terrain (you jumped over it).
• The Booster 0.8 from Cave Story , when equipped, lets the player propel themselves upward for a short while before touching the ground. Booster 2.0 not only is faster, it allows for swift movement in four directions.
• In Mischief Makers, Marina's gynoid body includes thruster jets, activated by double-tapping the D-pad or pressing one of the C-buttons to boost herself in the direction specified. This can be done repeatedly, but the cooldown between bursts is enough that she still slowly loses altitude when dashing horizontally in mid-air, and boosting vertically lets her effectively hover but not ascend.
• In Metroid Prime, the Space Jump is enabled by a set of boosters attached to the boots of the power suit. The 2D games in the series tend to have it as something much more substantial.
• Reapers in Starcraft II can jump up and down cliffs with their jet packs.
• Dawn of War. Assault Marines, Chaos Raptors, Ork Stormboyz, Tau Stealthsuits and Crisis suits, and the Sisters of Battle's Seraphim all use jump packs, with Raptors and Stormboyz having an upgrade that makes them move faster for a while.
• Players on foot in Titanfall have jump packs that lets you Double Jump and run on walls.
• Half-Life: The HEV Suit has a long jump module that's effectively a big rocket attached to Gordon's back for crossing gaps his normal jump had no hope of reaching. It's only used in the final leg of the game and is abandoned in the sequel. The Fan Remake Black Mesa expands on its functionality, allowing Gordon to use it to strafe-jump, change the direction of his jump once while he's in midair, and adding landing jets that automatically negate fall damage.
• The Ratchet & Clank games has "Thruster Pack" as an option for Clank. It's mainly used for hovering, covering long distances and high jumping.
• In the Rocket Knight Adventures video game series, this is Sparkster's jet pack's primary function. Only in a select number of levels does it grant real flight.
• Cloudberry Kingdom's jetpack works as a boost to your jump instead of instantly providing lift. It can allow for flight but in practise only functions as a super jump instead of hovering.
• The Super Rush Adapter from Mega Man 7 gives Mega Man - among other things - a pair of jet thrusters on his back. However, it doesn't grant him flight like Mega Man 6 did. Instead, it grants him the ability to do a Double Jump.
• FLUDD's Rocket Nozzle in Super Mario Sunshine. Possibly the Turbo one for a horizontal equivalent.
• In Low G Man, the title character's backpack allows him to jump higher, though it's powered by anti-gravity Applied Phlebotinum rather than jet engines.
• Halo:
  • Halo 3 introduces the Brute Jumper, who have the ability to leap great distances across the battlefield. Future examples of similar enemies, such as the Elite Rangers in Reach, 4 and 5, plus the Grunt and Jackal Rangers in 4 and 5, and Brute Captains in Infinite, all follow the Brute Jumper's lead.
  • Halo: Reach provides the "Evade" Armor Ability, which is the default ability of Elite players in multiplayer and allows them to rapidly move in a chosen direction, even in mid-air. Halo 4 expanded upon this with the "Thruster Pack" Armor Ability, which works similarly. Halo 5: Guardians includes "Thrusters" as a Spartan Ability that all players can use at any time, either to barge forward when sprinting or to move in any direction while in mid-air. Finally, Halo Infinite reintroduces the Thruster Pack as a piece of Equipment, which combines the versatility of its Halo 4 version with the snappiness of the Halo 5 ability.
• Exosuits in Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare get these, both for high jumps and slowed descents.
• Jumpjets in the MechWarrior series will rocket your Humongous Mecha into the air but generally have limited fuel. In Mechwarrior 2, thrusters could be vectored in any direction, allowing players to "ski" across the ground. 4 launched the user into a slow unguided arc and was generally used for sniping from behind cover. Living Legends has two variants for mechs which offer either superb vertical or horizontal acceleration (both of which have Camera Abuse and Over Heating issues), along with a jump pack for its Powered Armor which can be used for crazy maneuvers in low-grav environments
• Imperial Dark Troopers in Star Wars: Battlefront use these for mobility. They don't provide actual flight like with their predecessors, the Republic's Jet Troopers, but they're much faster and can be used to give a lateral speed boost, as well.
• The Tha'Roon in WarWind have an elite unit called Jump Troop, powerfully armed an wearing a power armour, but also able to make short jumps using a jetpack. This may be useful when you want to go through an otherwise unpassable terrain and create a diversion among enemy ranks. Unfortunately, since Jump Troops are an elite unit, they require so much resources that you'll probably afford only one of them.
• Grineer Hellions in Warframe have a rocket pack that allows them to vault from location to location and hover in the air for a few seconds. It also has a built-in mini-Macross Missile Massacre launcher. Shooting the pack causes it to explode outwards, hurting everything nearby but the Hellion itself.
• In PlanetSide 2, Light Assault troopers have a choice of three jump jet packs, which have variable amounts of horizontal/vertical thrust and (regenerating) fuel. Standard jets are jack-of-all-stats, Drifter jets can't lift upwards for crap but have tons of fuel for horizontal, and Icarus jets can't steer and have next to no fuel but have huge amounts of vertical thrust. In the original game, the Vanu Sovereignty Powered Armor had jump jets as their special ability and each empire had a Humongous Mecha with a limited flight ability at the cost of disabling their Deflector Shields.
• In Battlezone II: Combat Commander, pilots have a single-use jetpack that sends them rocketing into the sky, either for returning to base after ejecting from a tank or fleeing from certain death. Thanks to low gravity, it's possible to glide for quite some distance after activating the jet.
• The Mako in Mass Effect comes with thrusters that help it make hops. It's useful in dodging painfully slow projectiles as well as crossing rugged terrain.
  • Mass Effect: Andromeda not only gives you a vehicle with similar thrusters to the Mako, it gives the player character a jump pack as well, affording them quite a bit more mobility than Shepard ever had.
• Overwatch:
  • Pharah has one of these built into her Powered Armor. She can launch herself into the air and then briefly hover to ambush enemies from above.
  • Winston has an ability actually called "Jump Pack" that can be used offensively (leaping into a group of enemies to damage them and knock them back), defensively (leaping out of a heated battle to a safe location), or just to get back into the fray in a hurry.
• The aptly titled "Jump Pack" from Star Wars Battlefront (2015) sends the user flying up and forward through the air in a way that provides more mobility and than any other Star Card in the game. It's practically a necessity to keep up with a game on any outdoors map and even indoors it can let players fly over the enemies heads and flank them.
• The Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3 DLC Uprising has Cyro Legionnaires whose jump packs can get them over obstructions or shatter frozen units by landing on them.
• In Tribes, every armor comes equipped with a recharging jet pack for aerial maneuverability. When combined with the game's Ascended Glitch to allow rapid frictionless 'skiing' downhill, it turns it into the world's fastest shooter, with players screaming across the terrain at 200kph and jumping a hundred meters in the air. Tribes: Vengeance even came with a tank that had a jet pack, allowing it to smack players out of the sky in a midair ram or splat them under its treads.
• Drogoz from Paladins has a jet pack that launches himself straight up and hover for a good amount of time, but his horizontal movement is rather slow. However, his flight speed can be increased with the legendary card, "W.Y.R.M. Jets".
• Destiny: While the Cabal's sole tactic in battlefield is "slow advance", their foot soldiers use jump packs to reposition themselves or advance on an enemy faster.
• Team Fortress 2 finally included one of these in the Jungle Inferno update, in the form of the Thermal Thruster; a secondary weapon for the Pyro. It's more of a utility than a dedicated weapon — mostly serving to give the masked arsonist upward mobility and a useful emergency getaway option — though it can deal damage by dropping down on opponents with a Goomba Stomp like Soldier's Mantreads, and the thrust from the take-off can also push foes backward and extinguish burning teammates.
• Train Your Minibot: Minibot has a jet pack built into his back. He uses it to propel himself upward and hover.
• The player characters of the old Spanish game Sol Negro ("Black Sun") used these things, including a cool-down time if they were used for too long.

Western Animation

• Transformers: Animated: Prowl had jump jetpacks initially before getting samurai armor that included a jet pack.
• In Voltron: Legendary Defender, Paladin armor includes a jetpack which is fairly maneuverable but has a limited fuel supply. As the armor is also a functional spacesuit, it appears to have been designed primarily for use in space.

Real Life

• During the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, big balloons worn on backpack-like straps were available as stunt devices, allowing very high jumps but not negating the entire weight of the wearer. Since then, jetpacks replaced them as stunt devices; neither them nor those were ever really practical. Today, most real jetpacks are of this type.
• Given the limited fuel capacity of a Jet Pack, this was the real intention when jetpacks were being developed for military use. The idea was that soldiers would use them as a quick means of crossing obstacles like rivers or minefields, rather than just flying around waiting for the enemy to shoot them out of the sky.

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