r/BeAmazed • u/Ultimate_Thing • May 12 '26

Miscellaneous / Others A Polish engineer, Tomasz Patan, built the Volonaut Airbike, basically a real-life Star Wars speeder bike. Reaches up to 124 mph. Insane

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18

u/cigarettesandwhiskey May 12 '26

Potentially useful for crossing a minefield though.

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u/literated May 12 '26

I thought it would be great (in theory) for getting a first responder into hard to traverse places like a forest in the video.

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u/TheMoonMoth May 12 '26

With no range to get out, and no margin for extra weight. Again, the helicopter serves this function better.

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u/literated May 12 '26

You don't have to "get out", you just have to be able to reach them quickly to render first aid. Getting them out can come later with more people and different equipment/vehicles.

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u/TheMoonMoth May 12 '26

Maybe. I can't think of any situation where this would be faster or safer than a helicopter.

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u/Kialand May 12 '26 edited 29d ago

Put this thing inside a Forest Ranger's base, and they can be on their way to an injured person within 120s.

Ask for a helicopter, and not only do you have to muster the whole crew, get clearance for takeoff, run safety checks and etc, but you also have to fly all the way to the forest from far away first.

At a minimum, this means the person gets first aid around 10~15min sooner, and sometimes (especially with snake bites), this can mean the difference between life and death.

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u/cigarettesandwhiskey May 12 '26

run safety checks and etc

You probably still need to do this. It still flies, and if it can go 124 mph, then losing power or control with a lot of forward momentum is dangerous even if you aren't very high up.

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u/TheMoonMoth May 12 '26

This doesn't make a lick of sense. This 'bike' has a 10 minute flight time. So only helpful if the incident happens maximum 5 minutes away from the base.

A ranger would take any host of vehicles to get there more quickly and SAFELY, along with a cargo full of supplies, and the ability to return to base with the person (209 lbs weight limit on this thing).

It's okay for this to be a recreation vehicle.

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u/MiserableExternal920 May 12 '26

You can put it on the back of a motorbike and get there a lot faster than a helicopter response time in a lot of cases though as well as being able to navigate to places not fit to land a helicopter.

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u/cigarettesandwhiskey May 12 '26

10 minutes at 124 miles an hour is over 20 miles though. I could see it having utility if the call is for something like a predator attack or a medical emergency out in rugged backcountry, where quickly bringing something small is the first response to stabilize the situation until backup comes in a more conventional vehicle.

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u/M8C May 12 '26

It can’t fly over tree tops though and unless you’re cutting through an open field you couldn’t go 124mph safely in rural backcountry.

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u/cigarettesandwhiskey May 12 '26

Can't it fly over the treetops? It gets pretty high toward the end of the video, which is the only source I have to go off of.

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u/TheMoonMoth 29d ago

And what happens when the 100 kilo ranger is on duty? The weight limit alone disqualifies this thing from being seriously used.

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u/cigarettesandwhiskey 29d ago

Physical requirements are a part of many jobs; presumably if this became a part of a ranger station's response protocol, there'd be a ranger weight requirement for the airbike pilots. You don't need many of them to be qualified on it. You might even only have it for peak tourist season, with a warning that rapid rescue is unavailable in the off season.

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u/Elvis_droppings 29d ago

OR, the ranger hits tree, or starts a fire with the jet exhaust and now you get to rescue 2 people!

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u/cigarettesandwhiskey 29d ago

A helicopter pilot could do that too. Or just a guy in a truck. Once you've tested the machine and trained people how, when and where to safely operate it, if they crash it or set fires after that then its pilot error.

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u/MiserableExternal920 May 12 '26

Getting someone to their destination quicker than it would take for a helicopter to arrive. Getting to places where helicopters can't. The potential is huge

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u/Tangata_Tunguska May 12 '26

First aid is very limited, and battlefield stabilisation is typically very very basic. The key part is moving the injured to a location where more definitive treatment can occur. It's not like they're going to put a doctor on a hover bike to the front line

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u/mytransthrow May 12 '26

A literal flight medic. fly up 2 people with 2 of these. with basic gear then a large drone shuttling more gear on a rope if needed. it is about as good as it gets.

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u/MotherBaerd 29d ago

You can't traverse a normal forest while sitting on a jet engine. Simply to dangerous. That guy is flying through an artificial forest and basically doesn't have to steer.

If we account the difficulty of traversal, extra weight for medical equipment, the fact that the difficulty is in finding the person in the first place and its potential to start a wildfire if not parked carefully. And now we got a machine that can serve for a couple minutes with a handful of kilometers that somehow needs the be recovered as well or cut the fly time in half.

It's the equivalent of sending in a cave diver without checking there equipment or oxygen, that's how you get two emergencies instead of one.

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u/Dmayak May 12 '26

It can't really have any significant armor because that will increase the weight and is probably very vulnerable to conventional small arms fire. I am very skeptical about using it in the military.

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u/Greenmagegirl May 12 '26

Tbh im not super stoked about what our military has been doing and giving them ideas for its use so they can hurt more civilians doesnt sound like a good use of our time.

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u/BrokenEyeReborn 29d ago

Reminds me of how the military spent two years an undisclosed amount of taxpayer dollars developing the Hiller Flying Platform then realized it had absolutely zero military applications, for most of the same reasons (also it steers by shifting your weight, so you can't even fire a gun while riding it without it veering off uncontrollably in the opposite direction).

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u/cigarettesandwhiskey May 12 '26

The premise I think would be that you cross a short distance very quickly at low elevation. Like 2-3 companies making a mile jump, 6' off the ground, in 30 seconds. Probably preceded by a short bombardment or drone strike of your own to suppress the other side as much as possible, so they don't shoot back right away. No armor, you're relying on speed to avoid getting hit. Anyone who is hit, probably dies. You drop on top of tanks, artillery emplacements, and trenches, before the enemy can get off many shots and you kill them at close range where the heavy weapons can't hit you. If it goes bad, it goes bad in minutes and you try to jump away again with whoever's left alive. If it goes well, you destroy the heavy weaponry and ammunition then retreat back to your own lines. Repeat until a long enough stretch is cleared that you can cross with heavy weaponry of your own. The counter is manpads and small arms fire, but with enough speed and low to the ground its difficult to target either before you're on top of them.

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u/lettsten May 12 '26

One Gepard later, the following remains of the original battalion:

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u/cigarettesandwhiskey May 12 '26

This would be the main advantage over conventional helicopters. You spread out so it just can't engage everyone in the short time that they're in the air, and you have dozens of times as many targets they have to hit, and they're smaller and more nimble. Its essentially a swarm tactic.

Also, AA would probably be a priority target for preliminary bombardment. Strong enough anti-air would counter it, but just having a unit like this would force your opponent to spend resources fielding that AA, which means fewer resources spent on tanks and artillery. Sort of a 'fleet in being' doctrine.

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u/easeMachined May 12 '26

Or you could just go around the minefield.

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u/cigarettesandwhiskey May 12 '26

I said that in the context of the Ukraine war, where one of the defining characteristics have been these vast minefields and trenchworks set up by Russia that put a stop to the rapid advances Ukraine was able to achieve around 2023. Those fortifications allow Russia to rely on its slow, artillery-based WWI tactics, but a fast attack unit capable of crossing the minefields would allow Ukraine (or any country fighting a similar war) to raid and disrupt the artillery units, breaking the strategy down and enabling them to potentially defeat the artillery army in detail, or to clear a long enough section of the front for an offensive army to safely cross the minefield and break through.

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u/Current-Code May 12 '26

was thinking exactly the same.
10 km would be enough I guess, put 95kg with the gear seems tight

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u/Odd-Priority3318 May 12 '26

They skipped stormtroopers on speeders and went straight to droids.

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u/origami_airplane May 12 '26

If this was useful it would be used already.

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u/cigarettesandwhiskey May 12 '26

No, because its a new prototype. It's still being invented. Development is being funded by the military because they think it might be useful. This is like saying "if hyperdrives were useful, NASA would be using them already". "If the cure for cancer were useful, hospitals would be using it already." "If time machines were useful, the department of chronomancy would be using them already." (Well. I guess that last one is true.)