what do you think of SeaSteading?

Discussion in 'Boat Design' started by Squidly-Diddly, Feb 20, 2019.

  1. Squidly-Diddly
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    Squidly-Diddly Senior Member

     
  2. Squidly-Diddly
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    Squidly-Diddly Senior Member

    I'm thinking the first obvious step would be use a bunch of mothballed warships and old containers and tankers and anchor them at some strategic midpoint. Use some old tankers to make a landing strip that would always point to the wind. AFAIK, its OK for aircraft tires to go off a 2" drop at any point landing or taking off, so decks could overlap. If it can't handle aircraft at certain (rare) sea conditions that would be OK.
     
  3. JamesG123
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    JamesG123 Senior Member

    If the "geniuses" who came up with the concept had done that, or even some buying and referbbing some older cruise ships, they might have been able to close the plan and they might be seasteading landlords by now.

    BTW- Warships aren't particularly good at anything besides shooting and getting shot at. They carry a lot of wasted structure and mass if you aren't doing any of that nonsense. Old container ships and tanks though...
     
  4. midlifecrisis
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    midlifecrisis Junior Member

    Well seastead is a form of real estate, so the answer must be location.
    A crowded city like Hong Kong, or cities in the Arabian sea, but you are correct, size imposes a certain level of rationality, possible ways of doing this will be explored in small single building experiments first.
     
  5. Angélique
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    Angélique aka Angel (only by name)

  6. JamesG123
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    JamesG123 Senior Member

    Their last "ideation" before folding was a custom built mega barge.
     
  7. Angélique
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    Angélique aka Angel (only by name)

    The on July 31, 2011 founded Blueseed ‘‘borrowed’’ the original idea from Theresa Klein, as it was her submission to the ‘‘Sink or Swim Business Plan Competition 2010’’ of the The Seasteading Institute. Among the judges of that competition was Max Marty, who was later one of the Blueseed founders. The competition's submissions were all submitted and released under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

    They'd better started as Theresa had suggested in her 2010 submission...

    Boundless Talent Consulting Services — Facilitating immigration of high tech talent Wayback Machine PDF

    Quote from page 7 (page 10 of 17 in the PDF)
    ‘‘ - 5.3.2 Weaknesses
    Construction of the Platform. The offshore platform may require years of construction and high capital investments before it is operational. However, this could be mitigated by using cruise ships to house employees in the interim period, which would also allow travel up and down the coast to bring employees into contact with multiple tech centers, before determining an optimal location. ’’
     
    Last edited: Feb 23, 2019
  8. JamesG123
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    JamesG123 Senior Member

    Yes I know. But they were doubtlessly hitting up investors with the grandious powerpoint visions of billion dollar mega-structures which you can still see from the archive of their website, to wit they probably declined. Thus, they quickly burned thru whatever money they'd gotten and went away.

    Early stage not called the startup "valley of death" for nothing.
     
  9. Squidly-Diddly
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    Squidly-Diddly Senior Member

    I'm not getting the benefits of that. Reason startups happen in garages is all the support stuff is already free (mom's cooking, laundry service, phone line and car). All that is flipped when offshore on a ship, and suddenly lettuce is $10.

    I'm further not getting it for any startup that could be done in a ship's cabin (internet only, no workshops) because if you can do it on a ship off CA coast you can do it in India or Africa, same WWW but cheaper rent.

    The one and only group that has contributed anything to the West in last 500yrs have been the Japanese, who have made major contributions to major American industry such as their color TVs, unique cars, trucks and motorcycles and Walkmans, Just In Time etc and Godzilla movies. None of that required a single Japanese to get within 4000 miles of USA, because Mankind created written language (and video tape).

    I guess you could anchor a ship off shore so Americans could visit, but that means either fairly long small boat ride, or helicopter, both of which are slow and expensive (and downright scary to many), and mostly would deprive visitors of several hours of WWW access.

    Like I said, IMO the way to get SeaSteading going would be find a reason for a deep pocket to have an important reason to be somewhere on the ocean, with logistics beyond any single ship, and that would be US Dept of Defense AKA World Police. The killer app would be ability to launch & land large previously landbased aircraft. Maybe get that project underway with a near-shore test runway for (at first) commercial air cargo (to take heat off airliner landings at major city).

    The benefit to sell to US DoD would be ability to use long haul cargo and airliners to supply a secure movable base/airport that wouldn't need to be anywhere near any foreign soil, with however much open ocean you do or don't want between you and nearest land. Plus ability to operate land based anti-sub such as new 737 based.

    Given costs of building new airports in major cities (most of which are on coasts, so only one way to expand on land) which can include weird stuff like Noise Abatement Grants for NIMBYs, and the revenue airports generate, a commercial floating airport, including a pontoon land-link for vehicles, might be feasible.
     
  10. JamesG123
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    JamesG123 Senior Member

    Which is what this start up failed. Hard.

    What some here are aware of, and probably all should be, is that there are some thing like a dozen schemes and start ups who want to launch hundreds or thousands (each, so ten thousand total) small communications satellites into low Earth orbit (LEO). These satellites are like a combination of the traditional comm sats and a flying cellular tower and they will whiz past each other faster than a speeding bullet while high tech antennas (that haven't been invented yet) track them as they flash overhead.

    The promise is high-speed internet connectivity anywhere on the surface of the Earth. The risk is that they will provoke what is called the "Kessler Syndrome" a run-away cascade of space debris as satellites crash into each other (ref: the movie "Gravity"). Some of these schemes have collected billions of dollars in investment because corporations and governments are very keen on doing business and fighting wars in distant, cheap places from their comfortable, expensive homes, via "telepresence" and "teleoperation". This is another reason why this seasteading scheme failed.
     
  11. Squidly-Diddly
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    Squidly-Diddly Senior Member

    Are you saying that in a WWW-based world Sea Steading not gonna happen due to lack of cheap bandwidth?

    I don't know anything about costs of laying cable on seafloors, or line of sight transmission of mega-data (maybe a line of anchored radar mast ships to nearest "land line"), but as long as you aren't hosting Youtube's main servers WWW access shouldn't be a deal breaker.

    I wouldn't worry too much about Kessler. The only frags that are gonna stick around would be the ones that happen to be in near perfect orbit path after the smash. Everything else either burns up within an hour, or 4 hours when it comes down after initial upward trajectory. Mostly, everything would lose a lot of speed, then fairly quickly fall. I don't see too much stuff gaining speed by squirting out from two slower objects smashing.

    This is all very low orbit so lighter frags shouldn't last too long even if in perfect orbit due to drag from outer atmosphere.

    And sounds like the general scheme of lots of repeaters means it would only be very short time until a missing unit's sector would be again covered by another unit.
     
  12. JamesG123
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    JamesG123 Senior Member

    No, I'm saying www-based seasteading isn't going to happen because the powers that be and the "masters of the universe" on Wall St. have put their money on creating a ubiquitous and omnipresent internet satellite connectivity that is supposed to make your location on Earth irrelevant. So a business model based around "location location location" will be obsolete.

    Um. no. Orbital dynamics are not intuitive. Objects don't fall out of orbit unless they are in very low orbits where drag can slow them down. That is at about 500 km or less. Above that, object will stay in orbit for decades to centuries. When two objects collide in orbit, whatever energy isn't consumed in the collision by breaking and vaporizing some mass, is retained by the pieces. They just spread out into unpredictable orbits like a shotgun blast along their old orbit. All of the pieces of the Iridium 33 and Cosmos 2251 that collided in 2009 are still in ever widening orbits a decade later.

    [​IMG]

    The biggest problem right now is that the solid state (non-moving) ground station antennas needed to track LEO sats as they whiz past. They don't stay in one fixed place in the sky like traditional geo-stationary comm and TV sats do. So the antenna has to be electronically steerable. They don't exist at the moment at any practical cost. But that isn't stopping the companies from launching all these hundreds of spacecraft into orbit now.

    If man made climate change and pollution of the oceans and biosphere bugs you, THIS should scare the piss out of you. We are reaching the point where the Kessler cascade is a certainty, but no once cares much because nothing like it has ever happened before and few people realize how dependent our modern world is on satellites.

    Anyway, this is a pet peev of mine, and OT to the discussion,
     
  13. Squidly-Diddly
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    Squidly-Diddly Senior Member

    Interesting, I just assumed that because one of first attempts at SPACE-Steading, Skylab, crashed after fairly short life, that most other stuff would too, or at least if stuff wasn't scheduled to "Skylab" it would be exponentially less likely to bump into other stuff due to increase in volume.
     
  14. JamesG123
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    JamesG123 Senior Member

    Skylab was intentionally deorbited (slowed down so its orbit became lower), it didn't "crash".
     

  15. dsigned
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    dsigned O.R.C. Hunter

    Setting aside political and sociological feasibility, I think the designs as proposed are generally ill conceived. If I were building a large platform that needed to be seaworthy, I think I would go with a panamax (or super panamax) version of a swath hull. I think this is advantageous not simply if the seastead wants to go somewhere (e.g. to run away from a hurricane), but also simply if it's anchored, it allows the ship to orient itself to provide a minimum drag profile. Current panamax cruise ships can house roughly 3000 people for a non-trivial length of time. I'm guessing full time living (without regularly taking on large amounts of provisions) would decrease this number somewhat, but with some sort of non-fossil fuel based propulsion (e.g. a combination of wind, solar and nuclear) I think you could conceivably have a long-term living situation for 1500 people. While that's well short of something like a 5-6 million person city, it's significantly larger than anything larger than a retirement community currently, and there's no reason you couldn't build a bigger one, it just would have to stay in deeper water.
     
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