Hi! Existing designs and structures?
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This topic has 1 voice, contains 22 replies, and was last updated by 
MicroBalrog 1120 days ago.
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| March 28, 2009 at 10:01 pm #864 | |
 MicroBalrog | Hi guys. I’m a bit new to seasteading, so maybe this was brought up somewhere before. I see a lot of this forum dealing with experimental platforms of various kinds, whether the general seastead design that’s shown on the front page or something else. It appears it’ll take years before the designs are built, tested, and deployed. But! Has anybody considered using an existing design or vessel? There are immense amounts of old oil rigs out there, or even ships. After all, any floating structure can be a seastead, right? |
| March 29, 2009 at 3:06 am #5333 | |
| MicroBalrog | I see boats addressed there. But what about oil rigs? Aren’t there already a lot of abandoned oil rigs out there? Also. The Seasteading Institute, is it centralized? Or is this a decentralized, open-source project? Am I understanding this correctly? |
| March 29, 2009 at 3:13 am #5332 | |
 DM8954 | Actually. this is a common question, I think. It has been brought up as a valid intermediate option to get things started and get people out on the water. There are many pros and cons to consider, though. Here is a link to a section of an FAQ called Alternative Strategies from the book that answers exactly that question. There is also a seasteading wiki entry here on the topic. Don’t feel bad about asking, though. It’s a fair question. Welcome to the forums. |
| March 29, 2009 at 3:23 am #5335 | |
| DM8954 | I don’t know about abandoned oil rigs or if there are really a lot of them. I think they are generally reclaimed if possible. The ones that can float are probably reused, while the stationary ones (on the seabed) are less desireable for many people here. The other problem is the cost to refit them. Even if you buy the basic platform at a considerable discount (or even free), the cost to rip the insides out and make it work for our new needs might get quite high. Those rigs are full of pipes and equipment and I imagine the quarters aren’t exactly spacious in their normal configuration. Still, that doesn’t count it out as an option but it might not be quite as easy as it sounds on the surface. As far as how TSI works, I believe there is just a small core of people who run the official organization. Their intent is to get funding and do research and public relations to help get things moving. Except for the patents they’ve applied for, it’s generally an open-source operation where anyone can generate ideas for the project and you can use whatever ideas you find to make your own attempt at settling the open ocean. I’m sure others have a more thourough answer on this for you but I hope it helps you for now. |
| March 29, 2009 at 3:19 am #5336 | |
| MicroBalrog | See, I see several issues with the concept as it stands today. In brief, everything has tradeoffs. Building seasteads on a purpose-built platform will make them more attractive for habitation, but the tradeoff is that this may or may not cost more and will definitely take more time. Under the timeline as published, the earliest seasteading community will appear in about five years. It’ll only grow sizeable in about 10-15 years. This is natural, because we need to wait for the platforms to get funding, to be built and tested. Building seasteads on an extant platfrom – like oil rigs – will make them less attractive for habitation, but the timing is limited only by people finding the oil rig or other platform. Another issue is that a workable seastead is composed of multiple systems:
I am not an engineer but I know that when your new design is composed of multiple systems, it is generally customary to test the new systems separately. Remember that the future seasteads will operate like space colonies – far away from the support of ‘civilized’ nations, isolated (by design) from the reach of government. If they fail, they will fail spectacularly. If they succeed, they will succeed beyond one’s wildest imagination. So, I think using an off-the-shelf platform is a great way to test systems 3 and 2 separately from 1. Just IMO. |
| March 30, 2009 at 9:24 pm #5346 | |
 Carl-Pålsson | Existing technologies is the way to go in the beginning. I like used boats or ships. The ocean is a moving fluid. I believe having the means to transport yourself away from bad weather as quickly and as cheaply as possible is important. With a slow moving high drag platform you are not taking advantage of the fluidity of the sea. Later on it can be prudent to design optimized seasteading platforms. But for this to be economical we need a lot more people willing to go live offshore than we have now. Today our mission is to demonstrate to the public that seasteading is viable in the long run. Used ships are dirty and nasty, and people will get seasick in the beginning. But they are cheap, and the early adopters will be rough and hardy pioneer types who can tolerate such a lifestyle. Squeaky clean comfortable platforms is for the normal people who will not be ready to take the plunge for many years. |
| March 31, 2009 at 2:13 am #5347 | |
 OCEANOPOLIS | |
| March 31, 2009 at 2:16 am #5348 | |
| OCEANOPOLIS | The site is interactive. Can click on them and check out the “full specs” or “photo gallery”. |
| March 31, 2009 at 11:56 am #5351 | |
| Carl-Pålsson | http://www.yachtworld.com/boats/1968/CRUISESHIP-130-METERS–1401340/Mediterranean
Price idea $ 1,7 Mill.(Jan 2005) Ship now under custody of the bank! Best to be used as a hotel vessel! $1700000 / 215 = $7906 per cabin. |
| March 31, 2009 at 2:38 pm #5357 | |
 Pastor_Jason | That’s if we paid the list price for this. There is a TON of profit in yacht sales, so it’s very likely this price could be reduced. I know we can’t find 215 people to come aboard for a seasteading life right now…. but…. if there was such a movement: I’d drop 8k immediately to be a part of it. I’m surprised this option wasn’t the first thing TSI attempted. Live Well! -Jason |
| March 31, 2009 at 4:23 pm #5361 | |
| DM8954 | I don’t know if I’d want to live full time in one of those cabins, at least in its current state. I saw this same ship last night and was crunching some numbers of my own. I’d expect to pay list price in my estimate. Getting it for less would be good and quite possible, but it’s good to estimate high when doing a budget. So, $1.7mil for the ship. Maybe another $2-$4mil to fix it up and upgrade many of the systems to something more in line with our needs. [Many of you might want to shove off with the ship as-is, but I expect there to be considerable repairs to be made, even if you only stick to repairing the fire damage.] As I said before, I doubt the current cabins are large enough for comfortable full-time living, so I’d convert the 215 cabins into about 100 cabins for my estimate. Keeping to the high end of the price range, that’s $5.7mil total, or $57,000 per person to move in. Even that isn’t such a bad price for a life of freedom abroad. However, as has been brought up before, the cost of food and fuel (mostly fuel) could get quite expensive. I’m sure there are docking fees at port, if you won’t be on the open ocean full time. Really, the daily cost of living is the main expense when going this route. The estimate given of $4000/hr for running a ship at cruising speed was likely for a much larger vessel, but it does drive the point home that it’s never as cut-and-dried as buying a boat and sailing off into the sunset. I still think this is worth looking into, especially in today’s market, but don’t convince yourselves that it’ll be vastly easier than every other option out there. Just keep an open mind. |
| March 31, 2009 at 4:55 pm #5363 | |
| OCEANOPOLIS | for sure they’ll take 1.3 (used to sell boats). Thats 6k/cabin, 2pp/cabin(lets say) is down to 3k per person!!! 430 pp now @ 10k a pop for a budget=4.3Mil. Fill her up, provision for 1 year,…ALL ABOARD, FULL STEAM AHEAD. Set courese to the Suez Canal, transit. Passage thru the Red Sea, Golf of Aden than set course 190 degree true for Mozambique Channel. Keep a good watch (and few AK47s) on that 1st leg when off Somalia’s coast for the pirates. Leave Madagascar on your port and head for WALTERS SHOAL Development and Maintenance by the EarthRef.org Database Team It is located aprox 455 nm s of the southern Madagascar coast, in International Waters. Drop the hook there (or run that baby aground) and here we go,we are in business in the tropical Indian Ocean waters surraunded by reefs and worm breeze. Keep a low profile internationally, trade w/ Madagascar (really cheap there and they’ll love our greenbacks), if anybody asks we say that we have engine problems, or ran aground, or just simply flip them, and live happily ever after:-). |
| April 1, 2009 at 12:43 am #5365 | |
| Carl-Pålsson | We don´t need to renovate before setting out. Sell the individual real estate as is to the highest bidder and let the buyers refurbish as they please. The saloon is fire damaged. Some restauranteur can buy this for market value minus whatever it will cost to clean up and put up new wallpaper. Just as an example. I agree there can be some costs associated with central infrastructure like the engines, but centrally planned total refurbishment of the whole boat is not the way to go. Fuel cost… you should be able to calculate this but really I am not too concerned about this in particular. We can cast anchor, off course, but that is sort of unreliable and static. Some government might get annoyed suddenly and ask us to leave. Then go somewhere else, turn off the engines and throw in a drift anchor. Then when you get to close to [whatever] just adjust your position again and repeat. One of the biggest expenses will perhaps be freight for imports. But assuming that we can stay in the same place for a decent amount of time (like maybe six months or so?) I think that the freight companies will start to compete for our business and coordinate shipments automatically. Entrepreneurs from our seastead-boat or people from the closest mainland with smaller freight ships can start competing for this business. Calling ports or even entering an EEZ is probably out of the question. We´d likely need to throw 75% of the stuff on the boat overboard. Besides, ships that go to ports already exist and they are called cruise ships. Not much point in making another one of those. 1600+ people are registered on this website after just a year or so of proper, but still low cost marketing efforts. Getting a couple of hundred to part with ten or twenty grand for something like this in a couple of years time doesn´t sound entirely unrealistic. Remember it is not necessarily a sunk[!] cost. Assuming the place doesn´t go tits up a la Bioshock you might even sell with a profit if and when you need to take a break from the rigors of seasteading. |
| April 4, 2009 at 8:31 am #5433 | |
 dichro | It’s a good question. Are we ready for this? Are *enough* of us ready for this? If we knew:
Could we divide 1 and 2 by 3, engage a lawyer to devise an appropriate holding structure in an appropriate jurisdiction, and issue shares/conditional contracts/other instruments that would in the aggregate cover 1 and 2 once they were all purchased, and charge on ahead? Would that really work? I suspect not. I think we need a few more things. We need a charter that’s specific to the vessel (boatstead, if you must). It should describe the positioning plans (whether a seamount off Madagascar or floating around the ocean), the legalities of registration etc., the social rules that will apply (the tired ol’ drugs/guns/sex/etc expectations), and the common services that will be provided, if any (resupply arrangements, regular/emergency transport to shore, indentured maintenance slaves, etc). Basically, the charter needs to contain all the information that anyone would need to evaluate the risks of buying into the project, particularly those around legal interference from authorities, geographic challenges (inconvenient having the boat on the other side of the planet, unless you’re intentionally buying a bolthole), and, to some extent, what expectations a shareholder can bring aboard. We need a timeshare plan. I don’t think it will be realistic for individuals to buy chunks of permanent space . It will be simply too expensive, and too risky, and, even if successful, would likely result in an underpopulated ghostship for much of the time. I’d propose selling dramatically more shares than the ship can support people, having each share bear a small financial burden for operational expenses (ideally, something that can be covered by personal debt, such as a cash advance on a credit card), and allow shareholders to access timeshared space (there’s mathematical models for enforcing various flavours of fairness). We need a liquid secondary market for the shares. (You’ll note that I’m proposing something not unlike government-managed housing here. I don’t expect there’ll be enough interest to fully lease the ship on a fulltime basis. Anyone that does have that level of interest would have the option of making a large enough investment to guarantee permanent access to a section, but, frankly, I’d be staggered if there was any significant percentage of space bought up like that at the start, or a significant number of full-time residents) We need Other Stuff that I’m too tired to think of right now. Some of these things, like the secondary market, are global infrastructure that are reusable at the option of any subsequent vessel. Some are local infrastructure, like fuel resupply or ferry runs, that other vessels intending to operate in the same area can reuse. And some are going to be specific to the vessel. These things are all necessary to define the contract between strangers that will combine funds to make it happen – we already know there isn’t a single coherent group that will do it themselves, whose consistent vision would obviate the need for spelling such things out. So people will need to have explained exactly what it is that they have a chance to buy a piece of. Want to start working on this? I do. |
| April 6, 2009 at 3:17 pm #5442 | |
 wohl1917 | Hi folks, there is a small point I’d like to make: we are attracted to the idea of Seasteads because we want to be ‘free’ right? We want to do ‘our own thing’ with out interference etc.,. Now, when the homesteaders proceeded into the wilderness whether it was the American West, Australia or South Africa they went out as individuals and families and staked claims and built the oppressive civilization that we seek to flea from now! They didn’t go out as a group prepared to build ready made communities (excluding the Mormons but that’s another story) all of that came later. As individuals and families they proceeded into the wilderness in their Conestoga waggons, sometimes in ‘trains’ but as often as not, alone following the beaten path. Now, my point is: the social structure of a Seastead, whether it’s a floating platform or a ship, would almost have to be ‘collectivist’ in nature or at least ‘corporate’ and isn’t that a bit counter to our goal of ‘freedom’? |
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