A container-shippable, solar-electric, soft-ride sea platform — and the reasons the design holds together as a system.
A 44-foot equilateral triangle of living space rests on three streamlined, half-submerged foil legs set at its corners. The legs carry the buoyancy, the walls carry the structure, the roof carries the power plant, and the whole kit — legs, walls, beams, thrusters, tender — nests into a single 45-foot High Cube shipping container. Nothing in the design is exotic; the value comes from how the choices reinforce one another. Below, each major claim is stated plainly, with the reasoning and the rough numbers behind it.
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| Footprint | Equilateral triangle, 44 ft per side; ≈840 ft² enclosed + ≈400 ft² walkway |
| Headroom | 7 ft floor-to-ceiling throughout |
| Legs | 3 × NACA 0035 foils, 21.5 ft long × 8.5 ft chord, half-immersed |
| Buoyancy | 27,500 lb at design waterline |
| Waterplane | ≈60 ft² — 1 ft of immersion ≈ 1/7 of displacement |
| Propulsion | 6 × 1.5-ft rim drives, fixed forward; differential-thrust steering |
| Energy | Full-roof solar (≈15 kW class) + ≈25% of displacement in LiFePO₄ batteries |
| Redundancy | 3 independent battery / inverter / thruster power domains |
| Shipping | Complete kit nests in one 45-ft High Cube container |
| Mooring | 3 tension-leg stations (paired helical screws + drive motors) |
| Tender | 14-ft RIB with Yamaha HARMO electric outboard, stowed aft |
Buoyancy is concentrated in three legs whose centers sit roughly 40 ft apart — close to three times the beam of a conventional 44-ft boat. Heel the platform and the lee leg buries while the weather leg unloads; the righting arm appears immediately and keeps growing all the way to extreme angles. Capsize is not a scenario to be managed — it is designed out. Ultimate stability is limited by the strength of the structure, not by any reachable angle of heel.
Only about 60 ft² of leg cross-section pierces the surface. Pressing the platform down one foot adds just ~1/7 of displacement in buoyancy, so the water "gives" and the mass barely notices. Chop that would jolt a monohull passes by largely ignored, and what motion remains is slow. Bolt-on heave plates low on each leg add damping and entrained-water inertia, flattening the residual movement further. The ride is closer to a small oil platform than to a boat — which is exactly the goal.
This is deliberately not an extreme SWATH. With 1 ft of submergence worth 1/7 of buoyancy, rising water engages meaningful reserve quickly: as seas build, the legs submerge deeper, buoyancy ramps up, and the platform rises and rides over the crests instead of being buried by them. Small waves are filtered out; large waves are climbed. That graceful transition is the safety valve that pure minimum-waterplane designs lack.
About a quarter of displacement is LiFePO₄ batteries stowed at the bottom of the legs, roughly 19 ft from the center. Every pound does double duty: the lowest possible center of gravity for stability, and a large radius of gyration that smooths pitch and roll like a flywheel. There is no dead ballast aboard — the "ballast" powers the boat.
Heave plates — and optionally small active fins — live far from the center of gravity, where a modest surface sees the highest velocities and produces the largest moments. Because the waterplane is small, small devices, and small low-power actuators in the active case, achieve what would require large machinery on a conventional hull. Stabilization authority is cheap here.
A classic semi-submersible drags three cylinders through the water; this design drags three NACA 0035 wings with their blunt, rounded leading edges facing forward. Streamlining cuts drag per unit of buoyancy by a large factor, which is what makes solar-electric transit at useful speeds plausible. It behaves like a semi-sub at anchor and much more like a slim multihull underway.
Six 1.5-ft rim-driven propulsors are built into the legs, all fixed facing forward. There are no shafts, struts, rudders, or steerable pods to foul or maintain. Steering is differential thrust; for docking, one side reverses while the other drives forward and the vessel pivots within its own footprint. Simplicity is the feature: fewer failure paths, less drag, quiet operation.
The same foil sections that reduce drag also resist leeward slip, acting like three large daggerboards. That opens the door to kite or sail assistance for free range, and it makes the classic storm playbook work: stream a drogue on a bridle off the stern, use the thrusters to hold a favorable heading, and let the low-waterplane hull ride it out. Few power platforms can sail; this one, in effect, can.
All ≈840 ft² of roof is collector — a ~15-kW-class array on a platform whose entire displacement budget is 27,500 lb. That watts-per-pound ratio is exceptional, and it is the single biggest enabler of genuine energy independence at sea. In tropical latitudes the roof alone can yield several tens of kilowatt-hours per day.
Each leg is its own power plant: its own batteries, charge controller, and inverter, feeding its own pair of thrusters. Any single leg can fail completely — mechanically or electrically — and the seastead retains two-thirds of its energy storage, power conversion, and propulsion, with independent failure modes. There is no single point that blacks out the boat.
Cabling to the thrusters exits through a conduit welded to the trailing edge of each foil. There are zero through-hull penetrations. Each leg is subdivided into multiple airtight compartments, so a breach is contained by geometry rather than fought with pumps. Damage tolerance is designed in, not bolted on.
Boat cost tracks displacement. By placing buoyancy only at three corners and letting the living-area walls double as the structural girder, the design buys ≈840 ft² of enclosed space plus ≈400 ft² of walkway out of a 27,500-lb budget that also includes ≈6,900 lb of batteries — leaving the remainder for people, water, and gear. A monohull or catamaran with the same interior would displace several times more, and cost accordingly.
The entire kit nests in a single 45-ft High Cube box: two legs nested curve-to-curve along one wall, the third beside them, three 7-ft wall sections standing upright along the other wall, and beams, floor panels, thrusters, and hardware filling the middle. It moves at standard container freight rates to any port, and assembly happens at a shipyard near the destination. The finished vessel never needs to make a delivery passage it wasn't designed for — and the 62,000-lb container limit is never remotely approached.
Fabricating in China, with a large share of cutting, forming, and welding done by CNC machinery, pushes cost below what a Western one-off yard would charge for the same tonnage. Standardized, repeatable modules are exactly what automation is good at.
Near each corner, a motorized unit between a pair of helical screws tensions the seastead down about 3 ft onto its moorings. With ≈60 ft² of waterplane, that pull is roughly 12,000 lb of pre-tension — the platform is drawn against the seabed and essentially stops moving. In the Caribbean's inch-scale tides and sheltered anchorages, the lines never go slack. For digital nomads this is the headline feature: a floating office that holds steady on video calls.
A stern-to-stern walkway connects two units, and both onboard computers coordinate all twelve thrusters to hold the gangway quiet — station-keeping as a social feature, prioritized whenever someone is crossing. Communities can grow one container-shippable module at a time.
The 3-ft walkway is aluminum grating, so boarding seas pass through it instead of loading the railing. Two aft doors serve the dinghy side. Ladders are built into the dry upper half of each leg. The 14-ft RIB stows deflated against the aft wall, riding in the wind shadow of the living block underway, with its electric HARMO outboard always attached and ready.
Individually, each choice is sensible. Together they compound: the small waterplane gives the soft ride and makes tension-leg mooring possible; the foil shape makes the small waterplane mobile; putting buoyancy only at the corners makes the structure light and the solar roof large; the light structure is what fits one container; and one container is what unlocks global build economics. The result is a platform that is stable underway and nearly motionless at anchor, powered and propelled redundantly, shippable anywhere, and inexpensive for the amount of living space it delivers.