structure

Seadrome

Jeff Chan gave an interesting presentation at the recent conference about Seadrome, an ocean platform design created back in the 30’s as an airplane refueling stop. It was never built due to increased aircraft range, but the design still serves as a good example of how to build a spar platform for the open ocean.

Check out the wiki page on Seadrome, and the PDF of his conference talk. He focused on the common elements between Seadrome, ClubStead, and other designs, as an indication of how best to approach the spar platform portion of the design space. As with other talks, we’ll be putting this talk online later this year once the slides have been edited into the video.

Pondering Prototype Processes

As ClubStead gets wrapped up, I’ve been pondering the next steps for our structure development. ClubStead demonstrates that a spar platform seastead can be built which can endure the worst storms in a fixed location of California, at a certain price point. But we don’t want to demonstrate just via engineering reports, we want to do it by building prototypes.

Engineering Q&A Webcast

With the release of all the engineering documents on our ClubStead page, lots of questions have come up. For example, some people have pointed out that the topside weight and platform load are incompatible, and that there are negative airgaps in some of the big wave scenarios.

We believe strongly in the virtues of transparency, which is why we released the engineering information as soon as we could – right after the patent was filed – even though it isn’t complete.

Snippets through 9/2/2008

  • Community
    • Added a box to the front page listing upcoming GTGs, with a module that automatically parses our Meetup.com Calendar.  Yay for standards that let web services play nicely together!
    • The German magazine Cicero: “Magazin Für Politische Kultur” is interested in doing an in-depth story this fall.
    • Please use the wiki to keep technical notes after a discussion!

Sealevator

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