Rocket Jumping

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Lore & Background

Rocket Jumping emerged from the brutal battlefield tactics of the Tribes universe, where soldiers equipped with jetpacks and heavy armor needed every advantage to survive. The technique was discovered by early pilots who realized that the concussive force of their own weapons could be harnessed for rapid ascent, bypassing terrain obstacles and surprising enemies. It became a hallmark of the game's culture, with clans developing complex jump sequences for map control and flag captures. In the lore, Rocket Jumping is often depicted as a risky but essential skill taught in advanced training modules. The practice is a universal technique that separates novices from veterans, with no single tribe claiming its origin. Despite its utility, Rocket Jumping is not without cost—the self-inflicted damage can be fatal if miscalculated, and medics are often needed to heal the resulting injuries. This risk-reward dynamic is a constant theme in the game's fiction, where pilots must balance ambition with survival.

In Their Own Story

The canyon walls loomed high, but Kael knew the path. He primed his spinfusor, aimed at the rock beneath his boots, and fired. The blast threw him skyward, armor groaning, shields flickering. Above the enemy's line of sight, he spotted the flag carrier—a Diamond Sword scout hugging the ridge. Kael twisted mid-air, fired again to maintain altitude, and descended like a meteor. The flag was his, but his legs would pay the price.

Reader's Guide

Rocket Jumping is a technique where you fire an explosive weapon at your feet or near your body to gain vertical or horizontal momentum. In Tribes, this is typically done with the spinfusor or other explosive launchers. The key is to time the jump with the explosion: jump first, then fire at the ground to maximize height while minimizing self-damage. To execute a basic rocket jump: 1) Look down at your feet. 2) Jump. 3) Immediately fire your weapon. The explosion will boost you upward. For horizontal movement, aim slightly behind you to gain forward speed. Advanced players chain jumps by firing again while airborne, often using jetpack fuel to extend flight. Why it matters: Rocket Jumping is essential for reaching high ledges, escaping pursuers, and surprising enemies. In competitive play, it's used to capture flags quickly or intercept opponents. Mastering it separates average players from elites, as it enables map shortcuts and aerial combat advantages. However, overuse can leave you vulnerable to damage—always keep an eye on your health, because one mistimed blast can send you to the respawn screen instead of the capture point.

Did You Know?

• The first documented rocket pack design was created in 1919 by Russian inventor Alexander Andreev, using oxygen and methane with wings roughly 1 metre long, but it was never built or tested.
• In 1632, Ottoman chronicler Evliya Çelebi recorded a story about Lagâri Hasan Çelebi flying a platform with seven rockets strapped to it, though modern physics rules the event out.
• The Bell Rocket Belt used nearly 90% pure hydrogen peroxide, which decomposes into superheated steam and oxygen at 740°C in under 1/10 millisecond, expanding 5,000 times in volume.
• Current hydrogen peroxide rocket belts can only fly for about 30 seconds due to the limited amount of fuel a user can carry unassisted.
• A flight was staged during the opening ceremony of the 1984 Summer Olympic Games in Los Angeles using a rocket pack.

A Century of Dreams and Early Experiments

The idea of a wearable device that hurls its wearer through the sky has captivated storytellers for roughly a century, yet the leap from fiction to engineering was painfully slow. One of the earliest written accounts dates to 1632, when Ottoman chronicler Evliya Çelebi described an artist-engineer named Lagâri Hasan Çelebi launching himself on a platform lashed with seven rockets. The tale says he bailed out onto a winged glider and landed in the Sea of Marmara, earning seventy silver coins and a cavalry rank from the sultan. Modern physics rules the event out, even though the man himself appears to have been real. The first documented pack design came in 1919 from Russian inventor Alexander Andreev, who sketched an oxygen-and-methane rocket flanked by wings roughly a metre long. A patent was granted, but no one ever built or flew it. In 1956, Romanian engineer Justin Capră claimed to have conceived a flying rucksack and quietly informed the American Embassy. Paratrooper Henri Coandă tested the idea, crashing on the first attempt but succeeding after adjusting the fuel and design. That prototype eventually inspired the 1962 Bell Laboratories backpack, which now sits in a museum.

The Chemistry of Personal Flight

The most common propulsion method for personal rocket packs relies on the decomposition of hydrogen peroxide. In the Bell Rocket Belt, nearly ninety percent pure peroxide is fed past a catalyst such as silver, triggering a reaction that completes in under a tenth of a millisecond. The liquid expands roughly five thousand times in volume, producing a superheated steam-and-oxygen mixture at around 740 degrees Celsius. The reaction releases about 2,500 kilojoules per kilogram of energy, and the hot gas is expelled directly through jet nozzles to generate thrust. A key advantage over conventional bipropellant rockets is safety: the exhaust, while hot, is significantly cooler than gases from alternative fuels, greatly reducing the risk of a catastrophic fire or explosion near the operator. The system is also far simpler to construct than a turbojet, which primarily expels ambient air. In fact, the classical Wendell Moore design can be assembled in a workshop by someone with solid engineering training and tool-making skill. An entirely different approach was tried in 1958 by Thiokol engineers Garry Burdett and Alexander Bohr, whose Jump Belt used high-pressure compressed nitrogen through two small downward nozzles to toss the wearer upward to about seven metres.

Thirty Seconds Against Gravity

Despite the romance of personal flight, the physics are unforgiving. Because an untethered pack must carry every drop of its fuel, the overall mass ratio severely limits how long a person can stay aloft. Current peroxide-based rocket belts top out at roughly thirty seconds of flight. The propellant itself is expensive, and the low exhaust velocity of the steam-oxygen jet means the specific impulse is poor; a conventional bipropellant could more than double that figure, but at the cost of much hotter, more dangerous exhaust. There are no dual-control training versions, so learning to fly the device is inherently risky, and the sheer difficulty of manually piloting it compounds the danger. Operators also face the constant threat of falling below minimum parachute altitude with no safety equipment to catch them. All of these constraints—Earth's gravity, the atmosphere, the low energy density of available fuels, and the human body's unsuitability for sustained flight—confine rocket packs to spectacular public demonstrations. The most famous example was a flight staged during the opening ceremony of the 1984 Summer Olympic Games in Los Angeles.

Where Gravity Lets Go

The one environment where a jet pack truly shines is outside Earth's atmosphere. In orbit, the absence of gravity and the lack of a friction-generating medium remove the two greatest obstacles to personal flight. Astronauts performing extra-vehicular activities can use jet-pack-style propulsion to manoeuvre freely, since the device no longer needs to fight the constant downward pull that limits every ground-based design to mere seconds. This is where the concept finally fulfils the sustained, graceful flight that science fiction has promised for a century. On the ground, engineers have tried to compensate for the lack of aerodynamic control surfaces by adding jets to the arms of the system. This configuration, known as a jet suit, incorporates the standard backpack thrusters together with additional nozzles on the forearms to improve manoeuvrability. The Daedalus Flight Pack is a notable example of this approach. While such suits still cannot escape the fundamental mass-ratio problem, they represent the closest practical approximation to the free, multi-directional movement that makes space-based jet-pack use so natural.