I've probably filed several hundred patent applications and had many more ideas, and a good while ago it occurred to me that reeling out a pod with an independent means of manoeuvre would be a good deal safer than descending a helicopter to the ground to deliver personnel or payload.
And the thing about the current tech ~ which is ideal for building boats on a small scale and manufacturing them on a large ~ is it makes the commercial impossible possible.
Amazon's much-heralded mode of delivery was never going to work, because they are literally an easy target and as soon as humankind invented guns, it wanted to shoot things out of the sky. Goodyear airships, for instance, sustain a shot a week.
Take bikes and scooters for hire by app: most are abandoned or thrown in the canal where I come from. And the principal target for the current riots in LA? Driverless cars, because they don't have drivers who are likely to get out and shoot you should you be trying to torch them.
Enter then the fastest growing means of delivery out of Africa... and into California.
The drone is launched by catapult ~ as might our boat ~ and enters the hover at its destination. Previously it would drop product by parachute, which works in expanses of rural Africa but not so much in the suburbs of LA.
Instead the delivery box within the pod can be manoeuvred to a point in your back yard the size of a dinner plate, and in winds of up to forty m.p.h.
Key to all this is operational experience, and a robustness that springs from lessons learned. For at the smallest scale and at comparatively low cost you've the luxury to experiment.
And that's where we're coming from.
