This paper is seriously incomplete.
My first web publication on seasteading, Seasteading -- Homesteading the High Seas [Gramlich1999], generating some useful feedback. First, the term seastead had been in coined as early as the 1960's and that there used to be a magazine published under that name [Clark2001]. (If anybody has a copies of those magazines, I'd be very interested to see them.) Several people contacted me and expressed doubt as the overall seaworthy-ness of using 2-liter beverage bottles for floation. While it is interesting to note that Rich Sowa has actually built a small floating island out of the technology [MotherEarth2001], I tend to agree that floatation based exclusively on 2-liter bottles is unlikely to survive even a modest sea storm.
The 2-liter bottle floatation idea was born out of frustration at previously published seasteading ideas that involved very complicated and expensive floatation strategies. I wanted to counteract the overly expensive floatation strategies with a scheme that was so cheap that it was basically free. Unfortunately, while the scheme was cheap, it was also unsafe. To be successful, seasteading must be both economical and safe. This paper proposes an alternative to 2-liter bottle floatation that is more expensive, but is much more likely to survive ocean storms.
I still stand by the incremental approach espoused by my first paper. Indeed, this paper gets more specific and suggests a number of inexpensive demonstrator projects that lead up to the actual sea worthy seastead. The first demonstrator is called Landstead1 and is done entirely on land. The second demonstrator is called Seastead1 and is meant to always live within sheltered water. The Seastead2 is a structural test article that is towed out the middle of the ocean to experience real ocean storms. The culmination of these three demonstrators is a seaworthy seastead that I call SeaStead3. By using the incremental approach, valuable data can be collected without incurring significant expense.
The Landstead1 demonstrator is meant to answer some specific questions about seasteading without incurring the expense of building any floatation. The questions to be answered are:
Please note it may be possible to skip the LandStead1 prototype with some good library research. Much of this stuff has already been done before.
Basically, Seastead1 is a floating version of Landstead1. It is designed to be only strong enough to survive in sheltered waters. One of its important purposes is to be a public relations demonstrator to help raise money for the follow on demonstrators.
Seastead2 is a structural test article that is used to see if pillar floatation (discussed below) is robust enough to survive real serious ocean storms. The basic concept is to build a modest piece of seastead floatation and test it by hauling it out into the ocean and letting it survive some serious ocean storms. There is enough intrumentation on the test article to identify ...
First I talk about ocean storms and waves, followed by oil drilling platforms, followed by lower cost seastead platforms.
As I researched ocean storms, I discovered that the ocean in the middle of a storm is an extremely hostile environment. The amount of energy stored in a large wave is quite scary
I managed to find a book on waves (and beaches) [Bascom1980] in one of my local libraries. There is a discussion about rogue waves that is quite interesting. A rogue wave is a wave that is significantly larger than its neighbors. From the few ships that have survived a rogue wave, what appears to happen is that the rogue wave has a deep trough followed by a high peak. The ship basically "falls" into the trough, and gets clobbered by the high peak that comes crashing over the top. The peak alone is not the problem, it is the combination of the two that are deadly. In addition, the book states some probabilities about how frequent rogue waves are. For a seastead that is intended to last decades, rogue waves are a virtual certainty.
In the August 2001 issue of Popular Science, David Helvarg [Helvarg2001] wrote an article about the current state of the art in oil drilling platforms in the Gulf of Mexico. These devices are currently quite expensive, $.5B -- $1.5B, but the oil companies can justify the cost because a single oil well can generate millions of dollars of revenue in a single day. In terms of cost per square meter of livable space, these platforms are probably measured in 10's of thousands of dollars per square meter.
What is interesting about oil drilling platforms is that they are the closest thing to permanent ocean structures that I know of. In addition, they are clearly designed to withstand hurricane class ocean storms, since the Gulf of Mexico is the frequrent recipient of such storms.
While there are a variety of different kinds of oil drilling platforms, they all basically have a strategy of placing the working platform a distance above the waves on pillars. Thus, only the pillars have to be designed to withstand the energy of the waves that smash against them.
My current thoughts on matrix technology have moved a little. I'm trying to reduce the cost without giving up any real safety. Rather than use a homogenous matrix, I'm thinking in terms of columns supporting platforms.
In a rectangular mode, the basic unit is a platform pillar that is N by N meters square on a pillar that is M meters long. The floatation is on the deep end of the M meter long pillar to avoid interacting with wave motion. The pillar is built as a truss like structure that lets the waves slice right through without imparting much momentum onto the pillar.
Four platform pillar objects are attached together in a square to build a stable flotation unit. The floatation units get assembled together to form more and more area. Stainless steel guy wires are run from the bottom of the pillars across to the tops of neighbor pillars to improve rigidity.
I've been leaning towards computer controlled floatation stability. This allows the whole platform to be raised high to allow easy inspection and repair of the bottom ends of the pillars. In calm waters, the platform surface can be lowered close to the surface to provide easy access to the water surface. In rough waters, the pillars would be have exposed and half under water to provide maximum immunity to bad waves.
Rogue waves are causing me to think that the pillar length (M) has to be at least 100 meters. For a homogeneous matrix, 100 meters of depth would get to be prohibitively expensive, but for the pillar design, it isn't a cost breaker.
Seastead3 is the culmination of the seastead demonstrators. It takes the lessons learned from Seastead1 and transplants them on top of the floatation structure from Seastead2. The net result is an ocean worthy seastead that people can start to colonize. Even so, it will probably only be based just outside of the 12-mile limit that defines international waters, just in case some serious problem occurs and there is a need to go running for land. As the years go by and overall confidence increases, Seastead3 can be redeployed further and further into ocean.
{Acknowledgements go here.}