Seastead

A seastead is a structure floating on the ocean that people can live on in deep water outside the jurisdiction of existing countries. Since the focus is just living on the water, and not getting anywhere quickly, a seastead design can sacrifice speed through the water to achieve lower costs per square foot and greater stability than a boat/yacht/ship of similar price.

Seasteads are expected to move at speeds like 1 to 2 MPH. With several days notice it might be able to get out of the path of the eye of a hurricane, but it can do much less to avoid an approaching storm than a faster boat could. It could however do a migration that generally avoided probable locations for storms. But it must be designed to be able to survive storms that it might encounter.

In judging the success of a seastead design we should compare it to boats in the same price range. So a $1 million seastead design should be compared to $1 million boats and a $100 million seastead to $100 million ships. If seasteads are much less able to run from storms, they should have better storm survivability than a similarly priced ship. Lacking pricing information for a design we could compare it to boats/ships of similar total weight.

There are several different lines of thinking on how best to proceed. The main ones seem to be:

1. Single Family Seastead
2. Floating City Seastead
3. Cruise Ship Seastead
4. Basestead