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Comment by bh42222 | Hacker News Reader

You know... that sounds doable.

Quadcopter are very fast and can go very far before they lose power. And a single sandwich is not a very heavy load.

If you are outdoors and can give it your GPS coordinates, a single restaurant/quadcopter port, could serve a very large area.

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Yep. You would need a) an iPhone app that you would use to place your order (it would send updated coordinates as you move around, and provide a perimeter within which you would have to stay) b) an army of quadcopters so that a subset of them could be charging while the others were making deliveries c) the quadcopters would have to be equipped with parachutes in case they malfunctioned so they wouldn't kill someone on the way down. d) The quadcopters would have to keep a persistent connection with the central server through wireless networks to keep in sync with your latest position and to send back their coordinates for you to see on your phone. e) there would have to be a mechanism in place to prevent mid-air collisions (buildings you could pre-encode, birds and other quadcopters you couldn`t) for bonus points, you generalize the whole thing and make it like an airbnb where people can exchange arbitrary goods and you just broker the deal and execute the deliveries for a fee that would be dynamically calculated based on distance and weight. DO IT. DO IT NOW.

Actually, you wouldn't even need to have extra quadcopters for charging purposes: you would just need extra batteries.

Given advances in ballistics I think a grilled cheese cannon would work just as well, and be cheaper.

I would be blowing $$$/week ordering grilled cheeses for unsuspecting friends.

Advances? In ballistics? Who are you Leonardo Da Vinci?

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