• Good points, I agree completely on most of it. The connections will need to work rather like a shock absorber on a car, as well as having joints at the point of connection permitting movement up, down, left and right (essentially a ball joint I guess or something to that effect).
• More couplings (diagonally) might be neccessary to keep the entire structure from folding or collapsing like a scissor. Or perhaps it´s more efficient to use another layout, with three couplings at 120 degrees apart for instance.
• Suspension bridges - depends on what you mean. A rope bridge won´t do because we need to keep minimum distance as well as maximum. Unless there was a frame of sorts outside the whole "forest" that pulled on the outer layer of spars.
• The "shock absorber" type connection could be made to telescope (like a shock absorber, duh) and the joint between the halves could be made like the surface of an escalator to avoid injuries to pedestrians and making walking and driving easier in rough seas.
• Floating connections - I don´t know, it seems like they would get submerged by waves. Can´t really see any benefits either.
• I guess the amount of wave action this arrangement could suffer without breaking or letting the spars collide is the big question. If one would need to disconnect frequently due to bad weather that might be a showstopper. If connections are needed below the sea that might be too much hassle as well .

• Very nice indeed. Here are a couple of videos that show the basic principle: http://www.vbuoy.com/thesystem-testing.html
• It looks pretty calm in spite of the large waves. I like how the structure sort of goes with the flow. This should enable building lighter and cheaper than if the legs were rigidly connected to the platform.
• To be quite honest my proposal was intended as a community of several family size spars rather than one entity. If this is even a useful distinction. Oh well they have similarities anyway.
• Is the VersaBuoy system a new find or have you considered it previously and decided against it, for seastead use? I don´t recall seeing it in the book earlier.

 edit: Those big couplings look expensive though. I wonder if you could make them cheaper somehow. A big chunk of rubber should be able to bend in a similar fashion. Sounds a bit too easy though, the VersaBuoy people would have thought of that, right?

Other reasons why not are that as the structure got wider the impact from waves would increase. I think so anyway, but exactly why this is escapes me at the moment... perhaps because the waves would act similarly on all seasteads at once. Or maybe it wouldn´t.

• And if there were windows in the spar most of them would be covered.

Why wouldn´t it be practical at sea? Besides imagine ten spars needing to travel hundreds of miles if one wants to undock. That is clearly not practical. In addition most ports will be way too shallow for a spar buoy to dock.

• Ok. Yes, it´s practical.
• You probably couldn´t do it in a storm of course but as long as the sea is reasonably calm I can´t think of a reason why not.

 If you press the reply link your post will end up in the correct subthread btw.