h a l f b a k e r yAsk your doctor if the Halfbakery is right for you.
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You constantly videos of delivery drivers carelessly throwing packages onto front porches showing the hardships and horrors modern civilization has to put up with. Our ancestors had to ride into town on a horse to get basic living supplies, but that's nothing like having your new video game disrespected
by having it tossed 20 feet through the air.
Unless this is a better way to do it in some cases. I used to have a paper route. This is child labor scheme where a young boy, 8 or 9 years old wakes up at 5 in the morning and carries 50 pounds of papers on his bike through dark streets tossing these papers, yes, tossing them, onto people's front porches. (I quit when I broke a window and they charged me two weeks wages for it)
Thing is, this is a pretty quick way to get a lot of lightweight deliveries to a lot of people, but the problem is aerodynamics.
So proposed is a padded package that's disk shaped and easily aimed at the recipient's porch. They're padded so they wont' break anything and the driver could simply deliver packages the same as child labor victims like me used to. Drive by slowly and toss it.
Larger packages would be hand walked to the porch of course, but I'd say half or more deliveries could be packaged as such cutting delivery time down by, dunno, 50%? More? Frisbee delivery option would be cheaper because of this.
Gonna check if this has been patented. Might have something here.
Also thinking of just having an offset wing setup like a maple tree seed or a big inflated ring around the edge, or just with thicker bubbles.
The time honored practice.
https://www.csmonit...g-news-to-your-door
Update it for modern times? Newspapers are dead, but small item delivery has never been a bigger business. [doctorremulac3, Sep 16 2022]
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One problem is that you're going to still have to strengthen the package against vertical loads, but now you're adding torque and lateral. The package will definitely be more expensive to make, heavier and larger for the same item. |
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Well I was thinking of starting with those standard bubblewrap rectangles for starters. They'd just require a different shaped cutter punching them out of the roll. |
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Beats the hell out of my idea for Boomerang Shaped Delivery Packages. |
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I think this idea bears merit although some might think it does not. |
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(Guy wearing a fake beard and sunglasses in the back row who’s totally not doctorremulac3."I like it!" |
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But seriously, seems that since a pretty big percentage of Amazon deliveries are small items, if you had a different category of shipment, even perhaps having a smaller electric vehicle, size of a golf course beer cart with the driver on the right hand side, they could fly through the neighborhoods paperboy style and deliver packages at, I don't know, ten times the rate? |
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These smaller electric vehicles might take over most of the delivery business and increase delivery time by several factors. Obviously this would be elective, you'd order "Regular delivery" or "Paper route style" paying less for having the well padded aerodynamic package used to get your product to your doorstep. |
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And this is something where I don't think an automated thrower would be necessary. If a human did this 8 hours a day they'd get amazingly good at it. |
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Hmm, maybe they direct a launcher, repetitive stress injury might be a thing. So okay, automation's back but it should be like any AI style launch system, it has to have human eyes on and approval before launch. But now we're talking barely slowing down before delivering a package, maybe even having these things be driven by robots. |
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//it has to have human eyes on// |
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Now Pert, obviously that's not to be taken literally, any arrangement of similarly shaped eyeballs would do just fine assuming their aerodynamic properties are appropriate for the job. |
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How about a TPO style system? |
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I'm thinking anything heavier than bubble wrap would be counter productive. Just stiff enough to remain flat would probably be the way to go. |
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And I'd say weight limit of the shipment would be whatever a newspaper weighs. Maybe lighter, as I said I know from first hand experience you can break a window with a newspaper. Ended my career as a paperboy. (thank god) |
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But the disc shape would act as a shock absorber, most of the mass being in the center of the Frisbee shaped envelope. |
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Could somebody chime in on why I shouldn't look into doing this? Seriously, you'll be saving me a lot of time. This started as a joke and I'm thinking it might be a really good idea. |
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So I'm going to assume this has never been thought of despite the fact that throwing deliveries onto porches (of rolled up newspapers) has been practiced since the 1800s with tens of millions of instances. |
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This needs to be evaluated. |
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