Our general plan is to have a “body” where people and equipment are above the water. Then there are “legs” that go down into the water. Then cables connect to “floats” that support the weight of everything. We will test out different possible designs for each of these components and also different combinations of the components. For example, we might have 3 legs and 3 floats, or 4 legs and 4 floats, or even 6 legs and 6 floats. The legs might be made of Green Heart logs, aluminum extruded in the shape of a wing, or titanium pipes. The floats might be made from two aluminum “dished ends” welded together, or large ship bumpers, or boat launch floats.
We have ordered a crane to assist in assembling different designs on our lot in Sandy Ground, and then we will use the same crane to lift them into the water.
Once in the water we may use another boat to tow them out into the waves for testing or put our own electric motors on the structure. The motors might go on the legs or on the floats.
We will also put solar panels and batteries in the body so we have electricity to power the electric motors. There will probably be 8 electric thrusters with 2 on each float so that the 4 floats can be turned by the thruster. So we might turn the front 2 floats to the right and the back 2 floats to the left to turn sharply to the right. We might also aim the body into the wind but have the floats aimed in a different direction. The software development to control all of this will be fun and interesting.
We hope to do a rapid prototyping strategy to quickly try out different designs and see what works.
After extensive testing in waves and inspections by qualified people we will eventually start taking deposits and then selling them.
Vincent Cate has made money through his ownership of Cate.ai Ltd, which generates revenue from its ownership of DataHaven.net Ltd, which in turn generates revenue from .ai domain sales. This has been a substantial amount of money and seems to be growing. It is hoped and expected that Vincent Cate has or will have sufficient funds to get Seasteads to the production stage. It is not known how long this will take, but hopefully less than 2 years.
There is only one other company, Ocean Builders in Panama, that is making Seasteads but they are not for open ocean and do not move on their own power. So we are targeting a new market of unknown size. We expect if we can get a good product the market will be a large enough niche to be worth the time and investment.