The Seasteading Institute

Horseapples

A cunning warrior can make any target far more trouble than it’s worth. It becomes a battle of logistical value. There’s no point in investing millions and millions of dollars in taking down a tiny independent state. Also, losing soldiers of any stripe creates negative publicity… something any politician is highly allergic to.

Put it this way, an Oberon class diesel submarine, sank the Nimitz in wargames. That’s a totally obsolete and ancient submarine.

Even a remote threat to an ACC carrier is enough to make anyone think twice. With an ACC on station, you’re suddenly dealing with massive logistical issues deploying any sort of warfighter and thier equipment/craft.

You can only get so many Navy Seals and thier rubber duckies into a submarine, esp in blue water conditions… and if the water is shallow…

In a nutshell :

There is no substitute for cunning.

undersea threats are you only real problem, they can be countered to a degree by shallow water, which is much harder to hide in. mines are still very effective weapons for a fixed installation.

if you can get a hardened goalkeeper or phalanx system in place, the only other real threats you have to face are free fall carpet bombing and THOR systems (orbital bombardment which no-one will currently admit to having).

I completely agree.

I intend to get some basic training with assualt rifles when i decide to leave my current sphere of monopoly of force: i think many people will do something simimlar.

Ten people with assualt rilfles fighting from higher ground for their lives: id like to see the pirate that feels like attacking such. Uninvited boarding will be nearly impossible for them, the only card them might have is threatning to sink us: although i suspect that will be harder than you think, way out of range of your average pirate. And what good would it do them?

Another thing: people all seem to be considering one seastead at a time. There may be a time when there is only one seastead, but i hope to see my community quickly grow to dozens of them. Thats hundereds of assualt rifles for you, and at that point we could easily throw in some RPG’s and heavy machine guns. Bye bye pirates.

But if conventional navies / airforces start to attack, we are fucked for the forseeable future. We might ramp up the cost of doing such a little, by carrying around some torpedos or AA missiles, but it would take a while before that would become affordable. Staying under the radar is what we should aim at, initially.

Who’s going to invest millions? Who says they are going to board you with SEALs? All they have to do is sink you from over the horizon.

• Or, they could interdict traffic for a while, which could easily be called an “exercise”. They just announce military live fire exercises in the area and riect civilian traffic around. they don’t even have to fire a round.

You have no chance against a professional navy. A platform on the water that can only move with or barely faster than the current is a sitting duck. Your only defense against the power of a government is public opinion, and economics (including lawsuits).

The four golden rules of firearms:

1. Treat all guns as if they are loaded, all the time, every time. Personally verify the state of your weapon every time you pick it up or have it handed back to you.
2. Never point a gun at anything you are not willing to destroy or kill. There is no “safe” direction. There are only higher and lower priorities of preservation.
3. Keep your finger off the trigger until you are ready to fire. Keep it straight and outside the trigger guard and no “accidents” will happen.
4. Be absolutely sure of your target, and what is behind it. If you can’t identify your target, you should not fire. Be sure of your backdrop- YOU are responsible for whatever you hit with your weapon, even if you did not mean to hit it. You may well miss your target- is it worth hitting whatever is behind your target? Even if you think your buddy could not possibly be in that direction and therefore anything over there must be a threat, do not fire until you verify. Your standard of verification may vary by circumstance.

Useful information besides the 4 rules:

• “Assault rifle”, even when used in its strictest sense, is kind of a silly term. All firearms are made with one purpose- to kill things. They are not made to “assault” things. All other purposes a firearm is used for are basically in aid of this one purpose.
• “Accidental discharges” only happen in the extremely rare case of mechanical failure of the firearm. Anything else is a “negligent discharge”.
• Guns don’t kill people, people kill people. WITH guns, among other things .
• Never “shoot to wound”. Always “shoot to stop”. The best way to stop someone intent on harming you is to shoot them center of mass. This is also most likely to kill them.
• Be ready to articulate your reasons for shooting a human being. You should have criteria thought out before you confront such a situation.
• Firearms do not substitute for mental preparation.
• Even people technically proficient with firearms typically have a very difficult time actually killing a human being.
• Just because you have shot someone, doesn’t mean they will die. Just because YOU have been shot, doesn’t mean you will die. Being mentally prepared to take damage and continue to defend yourself and live, may be the difference between living and dying. I have many friends who been shot or blown up (I have been in Iraq for most of the last 2 years). They lived.

All other details are just that. The particular operation of most firearms is extremely simple to figure out. They mostly operate on very simple principles. Maintenance of any particular model may be more or less complex. Mechanical accuracy of most (modern) firearms is far better than the practical ability of the average shooter. Proficiency only comes through practice. Rate of fire is far less important than accuracy.

• Consider yourself “basically trained”.

More seriously, these 4 rules at the top must become ingrained habit if you are ever to handle a firearm. The other thingds I have listed out are matters for further consideration and study. There are implications of implications to each of them. The ethics and legality of escalation of force are a field of study all in itself.

• Some recommend resources are the books by Lt. Col. David Grossman (U.S. Army, Ret.) and Gavin DeBecker, available at amazon.com among other places.

• Edited to add: Oh yeah, 90% of what you see in the movies related to guns is BULLSHIT. Not just the over-the-top stuff. If you have never handled a gun, do not assume ANYTHING you see on TV or in a movie is accurate. Quick example in a movie I saw again recently: in the movie Daredevil, Elektra fires a semi-auto pistol until it is empty, and continues to pull the triger “click click click” after the gun is empty. In real life, the slide would lock back and the trigger would no longer click, it would be in the fully rearward position until the slide is released. You can’t believe ANYTHING you see on TV in regards to guns in entertainment. They had to rig this movie prop to do something it would never do in real life. Why would they do that? It’s stupid.

I’ve seen islands that dwarf any aircraft carrier by orders of magnitude. TSi is in the business of building LAND, not SHIPS. Do you seriously think the US Navy could sink Antigua ?

“You could build an external tube around the spar for the torpedo to detonate against. Sort of like the grates that defend against RPG:s on tanks.”

I guess breakwaters would do, too, if they are made of many independant elements instead of a single box. Having lots of spare surface of seastead relative to the infrastructure aboard would help, too.

Everyone’s still waiting for you to poke those promised holes in the theory.