The study is available here (.PDF), and the presentation is available here (.m4v video).
Blog
For the past half-year or so, The Seasteading Institute has been toiling away on an engineering study that’s aimed at identifying the most promising configurations for early seastead communities. We’ve looked at three different hull configurations (ship, barge and semi-submersible) in a range of sizes to accommodate as few as 100 to as many as 5,000 seasteaders.
TSI is pleased to welcome its new Director of Engineering, George Petrie. George’s ongoing presence will enable TSI to increase its engineering output, making this partnership a critical milestone toward realizing the seasteading vision.
Thanks to Eelco Hoogendoorn and a host of valuable community support, our first offical Engineering report is now available for general parusal. You can pick it up from our new (and still in-progress) Research page, or download the PDF directly here.
From the Preface:
There are a wide variety of opinions in the seasteading community about whether Ephemerisle is a plausible path to full seasteading. [Here’s my pre-event pitch of why Ephemerisle is useful](http://www.seasteading.org/blogs/main/2009/08/05/why-ephemerisle-matters-to-seasteading). Post-event, I have an additional thought.
Our [Ephemerisle](http://ephemerisle.org/) structure and setup basically worked as plan, with a few exceptions. One is that it took longer than we expected, and was not completed by the noon Friday starting time (although everything did come together for Saturday evening).
Dominique Roddier’s presentation on Clubstead Engineering from the second annual Seasteading Conference is now available online:
Eelco Hoogendoorn’s talk entitled “Seastead Engineering Overview” is now available:
## The Seasteading Institute December 2009 Newsletter ##
>_We ought to avail ourselves of the sea, building floating cities on it so that we can move southward or northward according to the time of year….
We’ve completed our analysis of the responses to our community strategy survey, [originally posted here](http://www.seasteading.org/interact/forums/community/feedback-tsi/survey-feedback-wanted-accelerated-strategy-options). Thanks to all of you who took the time to respond!
A friend of mine from college, a mechanical engineer (and one of the most brilliant engineers I know), has been researching ocean wind energy systems. We’ve been discussing his ideas, and some of his thoughts on the industry are worth sharing (emphasis added):
> At the DC offshore renewable energy (electricity from waves, tides and currents) conference, I found that only a COUPLE outfits (namely OpenHydro and Pelamis) were actaully getting anywhere besides just talking and burning up grant money. They had real hardware being demonstrated and ordered by utilities.