Flying Marine?

[Foxbat]

Reading that account, it eliminates collateral damage by eliminating the need for an explosion but would only work if they pick the right target. If a civilian is mistakenly targetted, it would only limit the number of other innocents killed in the surrounding area. It’s not as if the missile has a specialised terrorist sniffer.

 

[Foxbat]

After a bit of research, I found the missile was the R9X variant of the Hellfire. It has long blades that pop out and essentially lacerate everything in its radius. It would make one hell of a mess if it hit a car (but with no explosion).

AGM-114 Hellfire - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Here’s the but - it wouldn’t have saved that family struck by a missile just after the pull out from Afghanistan. They weren’t terrorists, they were simply mistaken as being a threat. The missile itself doesn’t differentiate so it’s complete nonsense to claim it will kill only terrorists.

 

[Ursa major]

Rather handily, someone posted, yesterday evening, this video on Charlie Stross's blog --

-- which explains why the engines (two per arm, one in the backpack) are where they are.

It also talks about why flying low and/or over water is preferable (because it's safer if the engines conk out).

 

[The Crawling Chaos]

Problem with this tech is both your hands are too busy controlling your flight speed and direction to fire back at anyone trying to shoot you down (but I'll grant you that shooting a small moving target out of the sky is not that easy).

Still, when it comes to rapid troop insertion I'd rather use the flyboard.