• GTGs
  • The first Bay Area Seasteading Social will be on 9/15, sign up here.
  • October 10th conference - Online registration/payment are now set up!  Press releases coming soon.  Spread the word!
  • Whether or not you can make the conference, feel free to sign up for our post-conference social events on Saturday October 11th:
    

A guest post from TSI co-founder Wayne Gramlich about his vision for the evolution of seastead communities:

My model for a seastead community is that it will grow and evolve along the same lines of Venice, Italy. Venice started off as 118 small shallow islands off the coast of Italy. In the beginning, passage between the islands was via small boats. Over time these islands became fully populated and interconnected via bridges. I expect a seastead community to follow a similar evolutionary path.

While it would be wonderful to have a fully interconnected seastead city at the outset, basic economics dictate that an initial seastead community will start off as a heterogeneous collection of individual seasteads. These seasteads will range from sailboats, old converted cargo ships, ocean going yachts, and purpose built seasteads. The purpose built seasteads will range from small to medium and eventually to quite large. The small seasteads will be short and squat and relatively low to the ocean surface. The more expensive and comfortable seasteads will extend upwards from the sea surface to reduce interaction with large waves. Eventually, large elevated surfaces along the lines of Mini-Float, Float, Inc., or VersaBuoy will become available. The larger structures will be either be bolted together or interconnected via bridges.

Check out Topsider Homes, builder of Hurricane-Proof homes in the southeastern US:

They are trying to solve a similar problem, and came up with a similar solution to us, which is good to see.

I got the link via Vince Cate's great wavebreak page.  Vince has been testing floating breakwater designs in Anguilla, and I'm pretty sure he's done the most hands-on work so far, so good for him!  One of the tricky things about breakwaters is that it isn't always clear how their behavior scales, as discussed on the forums.  We're going to start talking to / hiring professional consultants in the coming weeks to flesh out our designs, so perhaps we can learn more about model testing from them.

Wayne had an awesome idea today for a demo device we could build in the Bay, we call it the sea-elevator (sealevator?).

As the project has been getting more active lately, Wayne & I are going to start meeting more on Wednesday's. We had an interesting design discussion about some of his thoughts on spar construction, Personal Seasteads, and detachable spars. Highlights: