Battery-powered jet board surfaces as possible special forces option

We're here at the Global Soft Foundation's annual Special Air Warfare Symposium

We're talking to the folks at Cracka here. Rob is going to show us a little bit about the dive board

So Rob, what are we looking at here? Yeah, absolutely. First, thanks for having me, talking

My name is Rob Wontowski. I'm with Sol Marine. I'm the U.S. rep. And we're demonstrating the Cracka board

So the crackle board is a rapidly inflatable jet board, three pieces, an inflatable board, a drive unit, and a lithium-ion battery that goes in there

Now, I played a little bit with the Zodiac boats when I was in the Marine Corps, but you got a little bit of a background to yourself

Tell me what your background is and how this is different than what I played with many years ago in the Marines

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I'm a retired Navy diver, retired W-5. I've spent most of my time within special operations as well as hard hat diving

And so the thing that makes this great for my time in spec war is the ability to flex this piece of kit expeditionary and deploy it rapidly is what makes it a real game changer

I can use this for an infill, ex-fill, CAS evacuation, surveillance and reconnaissance, humanitarian assistance

disaster recovery. And those two are because the draft on this, different than the Zodiac which you asked me and the wing boat now has a deeper draft with the outboard motor where we are jet impeller with a draft of only 16 inches

You mentioned batteries. So tell me a little bit about how this thing works. So the board's deflated, obviously

We inflate it probably three quarters. We slide in the drive unit through some runners, and then the lithium-ion battery slides in

here and locks down. and then it's turned on and then you can decide what mode you're going to operate in

We have three speeds, three modes. We have a stealth, one to two knots, no wake

A second mode, which is endurance, four to seven knots, and then speed, 18 knots

At the high end, if you're operating just like an EV car, you're going to consume battery

So at 18 knots, you'll probably get 40 to 50 minutes on that

whereas in a stealth mode, you probably get 18 hours. But we have a new battery coming out within the next couple months

that we've gotten 52% more endurance on that. So you can go faster or longer if you need to

And I imagine with the battery power, it's a quieter operation. Absolutely. Another great feature about this is the signature, the low silhouette

the battery, quiet, it's not an outboard, fuel consumption, all that stuff

And like I said, you can rapidly put it together, and you don't necessarily need a coxswain course

to get qualified on this. Myself, I could take you out, and within two minutes, you'd be operating that

It very intuitive Very quick learning short learning curve Short extremely short and also too to set it up and do maintenance is short And I understand that this is not yet a program of record but is it being played with a little bit

Probably can't say who, but can you tell us a little bit about how it's being experimented with now

Yeah, absolutely. So we started introducing the cracker board to the U.S. market just about a year ago

It's been in European Scandinavia, doing really well over there and employed through all their forces

And now in the United States, in special operations and conventional forces, we've had demos with both Big Army, USASOC, NSW, AFSOC

Yeah. So now with these individual craft, I imagine you can kind of like scale up and scale down

Absolutely. So if you wanted to three operator team or all the way up to like six or eight guys, you could have that

Yeah, absolutely. And at the extremist is our 1K, so 2,250 pounds

We've floated razors, quads, all kinds of things, up to 2,250 pounds

And then at the lower end, this is the 250, which is 550 pounds

More like a smaller load, two guys, everything, or surveillance, reconnaissance, quick deployment

And also another key factor, too, is each battery and drive unit goes in the same board, all four boards

so I don't need a different battery or drive unit for each different board. All interchangeable

All interchangeable. All uniform. And also, this is all wet-mateable, so for those that don't understand that

I can plug in plug out all the features the electronics in there I can swap out the battery If I carrying an extra battery I can swap that out all underway So you can power everything on board as well as use different or new devices that come into the system

Absolutely. We have plugs and programs, and we're adaptable to our end users, our customers

If they say, hey, I'd like another plug because I have another sensor. So we have a gyro stabilizer that can hold up to 70 pounds

So whatever your sensor package is, whether it's camera, counter UAS, or..

So I understand you may not need a driver for this. Correct. So we have, you can operate the cracker board manually, remotely, and autonomously

And we can operate through like Silvius Radio, MPU5, Starlink, whatever you want to operate it on

A lot of the concepts within both maritime and air and even on the ground now are these kind of robotic wingmen, so to speak

So you could essentially pilot a couple extra boats with you as even a solo driver

Yeah, absolutely. So we have our program and our autonomous feature so I can make a swarm

If I wanted a swarm of this or any other boat that's on our package with our beacon, it can track all that and control it

Well, a swarm of raiders or SEALs coming at me sounds kind of intimidating, so I'm going

to leave that there. Cool. We were talking with Rob about the Kraka, an interesting maritime capability for special

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