The Seasteading Institute

Reply To: Jesrad wrote:

[quote=Jesrad]This is the route I've been considering recently with the flattened truncated pyramid design. Being not built for speed but strength and durability out of hundreds of tons of ferrocement, a large and massive enough structure has a very large period of rolling and heaving, and is pretty much immune to waves. Building it more economically means using cheap and massive material, and distributing the maximum of that mass at the sides (it should be hollow in the middle, but reinforced enough not to collapse or fail). A sphere is not ideal, because the stresses from waves are concentrated on a shallow band and inexistent at the top and bottom: a cylinder is more adequate IMO.[/quote]

Ive been working on something that starts from pretty much the same reasoning as this. Big beefy hollow concrete cylinder, displacing lots of water, basalt on the bottom, and you have something rather steady. It moves up and down with the waves, but thats tolerable.

Ive been working out the details recently, and they are far exceeding my expectations. It doesnt economically scale down to single-family size, but as a foundation for a medium sized high-rise building (10x200m2), its really quite cheap and effective. And in terms of possible catastrophic failure modes, it beats living anywhere on land.

Having multiple of such massive-displacement structures connected in the right way opens some further interesting possibilities. Mobility other than by tugboat obviously not being one of them, but ive never seen that as realistic or necesary anyway.

Will post pictures, motivation, and my order of magnitude estimates soon.