@htownphantom Thanks for the question. Of course people want it to cost less. In fact, we really want it to cost less as well because we know that even more people will benefit from it. Sales volumes and demand will drive the price. As you might imagine, it is actually pretty expensive to engineer, develop, purchase tooling etc. for even what looks like a relatively simple product. There is a
lot of solid engineering in this product and delivering a high-quality product. We take the position that people are trusting their drone with the WaterStrider in difficult situations, so we don't cut corners to make the product so
cheap that nobody is happy with it or nobody feels safe using it.
People who've lost their $1000 drone (or $1500 for a P4) wish they had spent $159 on this. It's way less expensive than a new camera or especially a new drone. We're trying to get the product into as many hands as possible. People who have seen it in person, looked at it closely, and tried it out are totally sold on it. It really is a very high quality product.
Yes to your question about crashes, the landing pods are extremely tough and attached very securely. You can see in the drop test video on the campaign page that under a full rate descent onto concrete, they whole setup comes away with zero damage. During some of our aggressive testing, we actually hit a tree as we were moving into position over a river for a filming shot. A propeller was broken and the drone fell from about 20 feet into the river. The WaterStrider had no damage at all and floated the drone making it really easy to recover. After a bit of drying, the drone and WaterStrider are still flyable today. Even if you managed to rip off one of the landing pods in a crash (which would be extremely difficult), it will still float the drone solidly with just 3 landing pods. This would be true in any orientation, including upside down.
