We are working on a seastead design. The goal is to design our seastead such that all the parts can pack into a single a High Cube 45 foot container which has: width 7.7 ft height 8.9 ft length 44.6 ft max weight: 62,000 lbs (rated bouyancy at desired waterline is 27,500 lbs and we hope structure is enough under this that humans and their stuff can fit) Above the water there will be a big equilateral triangle frame, 44.0 feet on a side. The triangle frame is also the wall of the living area and will be 7 feet high (floor to ceiling). It will be enclosed and the whole inside the living area. Around the whole outside of the wall, except where the dinghy is in the back, will be a 3 foot wide walkway and railing that is bolted on and has some diagonal supports from below bracing to the wall (so walkway is 1 food higher than bottom of the wall). The walkway will have an aluminum grating that would let a wave pass through but you can walk on. Also two doors on the back side, one two feet in from left and one two feet in from the right side. There are 3 legs/floats/foils/wings/keels that provide the buoyancy, so it is a bit like a trimaran but with a very soft ride. Each leg/wing will 14.5 feet long and have a NACA 0040 foil shape with 8.5 foot chord except that the last 0.5 feet of the thinnest part will be cut short, so with foil does not come to a point at the trailing edge and fits within 8.9 feet hight of container. But the buoyancy is very close to that of an 8.5 foot chord foil. Each of the 3 legs will be attached to the underside of the big triangle near one of the 3 points. The center of the thickest part and going 1.5 feet in all directions from there will be within the area of the triangle, but within that constraint, each leg will be as close to the point of the triangle as possible. The legs will go down so that the lower half is in the water. This makes for a bit of "small waterline area" similar like a small oil platform but one that can move through the water easier because of the foil shape. It is not an extreme SWATH design as a 1 foot change in water level is about 1/7th of the total buoyancy, so still significant change. The 3 legs will all be parallel with the blunt or "leading edge of the wing" side facing forward so it is lower drag when moving forward than a typical cylinder on a semi-submersible platform. Each leg will be 50% under the water (so 0.5 * 14.5 feet) and the top 50% out of the water. On the top half of the front of each leg, so the top half that is out of the water, will be a built in ladder. The reason for these sizes for the triangle and legs is so they can pack into a container nicely and shipped to a shipyard anywhere for assembly. Imagine the 3 legs end-to-end with thin/trailing-edge of foil up and leading edge down on the right side of the container. So the right 3.4 feet of the container (width of legs) is used by the 3 legs. Then the 3 frame/wall sections will be upright (so 7 feet high) next to each other along the left side of the container. I am not sure the width of the walls but if they were 10 inches wide then 3 widths is 30 inches and some extra is 3 feet on the left side. There should still be lots of room in the center of the container for all the other parts. Connecting the mid points of the walls both at floor and ceiling level will be structural beams that make another triangle 22 feet on a side. Then all the remaining spans will be less than 22 feet. The rest of the floor and ceiling will be small pieces that are bolted in. On top of the roof there will be solar all over. With batteries and electric thrusters as the main propulsion system. There will be 6 RIM drive thrusters of 1.5 foot diameter, one on each side of the 3 legs/wings about 2 feet up from the bottom. These RIM drives will be all be fixed orientation to provide forward thrust. It will use differential thrust to turn. For slow movements in tight areas like harbors it can reverse thrust on one side and forward on the other to turn in place. There will be a conduit/pipe welded to the back of the trailing edge to take electrical wires down to the thrusters. There will not be any "through hulls" in the legs. The legs will also have multiple airtight compartments each for safety. Behind the back near the center will be two supports going out and 2 ropes going down to a dinghy. The dinghy is a 14 foot RIB boat (deflated for shipping) with an electric Yamaha HARMO outboard. It is sideways against the center of the backside of the living area. When the seastead is moving forward the dingy is shielded from the wind by the living area. On the lower part of each leg will be several bolt on heave plates. These will help dampen the response to waves. About 25% of the displacement will be for LiPo4 batteries which will be put low in the 3 legs. Each leg will have its own charge controller and inverter so there is triple redundant power on the seastead. Also, the thrusters for a leg will get power from that leg's inverter or batteries. So the 3 pairs of thrusters will have independent failure modes as far as power. When the seastead is going to be staying in one place for awhile, we can put down 3 helical mooring screws and give the seastead tension legs so it becomes nearly stationary when parked. Near each corner there will be a pair of helical mooring screws with a motor unit between them. We only plan to do this in the Caribbean where tides are very small and in protected places where the saves are small, so pulling down 3 feet will be sufficient to never go slack. Two seasteads will be able to connect together with a walkway, one behind the other, so that while underway people can move between seasteads, enabling a real community. The two computers for the two seastead will both work thrusters to minimize the movement of the walkway, particularly when warned that someone will be on it. I would like to be able to simulate seasteads like the one above in waves as as was done in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PsPeasVy248 What open source software can simulate simple designs in waves as was done in that video? That video is one of my earlier designs. I would like to be able to simulate in higher and higher waves and be able to tell what movement and accelerations are at different points in the seastead. But I want to be able to visualize it so it is easy to understand how things go wrong and what I might need to do different. Another problem is that in my models with 19 foot legs that can go from 1/2 in the water to where it is almost all in the water, so some "linear assumptions" like in Boundary Element Method (BEM) used in some models may not be accurate enough for my needs. It is an important question/experiment to see how much these legs damp heave and roll type motions. We have a computer with a very good GPU. So we could do some compulationally intensive simulations at no extra cost to us. Would be fun really to make use of this systems power. I don't care about simulating propulsion or the stabilizers for now. The important question at this point is how stable is a design on the waves and at what wave level might something fail. I would like a high level of engineering accuracy in the simulation. Project Chrono uses BEM so I worry it is not accurate enough for my unusual shaped models. I hear Chrono::FSI-SPH might be better for my needs. If we use this then Chrono is not using BEM? Capytaine and MoorDyn is another recommendation. Both of these can be used from Python. Claude Code and Cursor.ai can help me with Python scripts so it might go fast. I was told that Blender can be used but that the physics simulations are not at all accurate. Is that still true or has someone made something so I could do a reasonably accurate simulation of a simple seastead model using blender? And Claude Code or Cursor.ai could help me with this? I was told maybe using WEC-Sim and MoorDyn could work. Does this seem like a good way to go? Would these let me make videos showing how a seastead design would work in the ocean? Could WEC-Sim and MoorDyn handle this sort of thing? It seems this needs MATLAB which is not free (please estimate cost for a non-student in Anguilla). Also seems this requites "Simulink" add-on and "Simscape Multibody" so there is a high total cost. Really this should not be on my list of open source solutions. DualSPHysics is another one mentioned. For this they recommend a system with a good GPU but we have one. Does this seem good for my needs? OpenFOAM is another one that can make use of our compute cycles. Is there any other free software that might be a better way to simulate, test, and visualize my seastead design ideas? I like Claude Code and it has been a big help in setting up projects like this in the past so I am not to worried about something that may take some effort to get to first simulation. Please compare the different free software options (not just those listed above). Try to estimate how long it would take to get a simulating working in each (assume we have Claude Code helping). I generally like Linux but we have Windows machines we can use if needed. Also, after we get a simulation working for one seastead model design, how hard will it be to get another simulation running for a different model type?