Yep, Franky is absolutely correct.
What we are building in Panama are house boats. We are not claiming any micronations, no sovereignty other than what any other boater gets to enjoy.
I am fully hopeful that other companies get out and start building because we would all rather be living on these things rather than building them ourselves but nobody is doing so.
I grew tired of the megasuperstructure seasteads that required hundreds of millions of dollars in funding. I kept screaming to the Blue Frontiers people to "just build something already!". So when I met the aeronautical engineer, Rudiger Koch, down in Thailand who had already begun building I was all on board and was happy to test drive his prototype by living on it and promoting the concept of building more.
I will be the first to say that no seastead should, right now, be fully sustainable. Nor should any house or state or nation. I don't think Hong Kong or Singapore are any less sovereign for not producing their own rice or microprocessors for their computers. I don't think seasteaders should focus on having cattle ranches on the sea.
We are building floating homes. We are setting up manufacturing, moving full steam ahead on producing as many of these homes as possible while trying to keep the prices down. We are skipping the early stages that we would have done in Thailand of contracting out the manufacturing to another company (that would gouge us on cost because they could). We are setting up a full manufacturing facility in Panama with an assembly line for getting these things out the door, all within a marina where we can lower them into the water to a well protected location in an anchorage close to the marina.
This is certainly not seasteading, I will be the first to say that seasteading requires some sort of sovereignty. We proved we can build homes in the open ocean in Thailand. Now we're working out the manufacturing process while focusing on having a comfortable living experience for our customers.
We are not doing any fundraising, creating beautiful pictures of a city that will never exist only to collect millions of dollars while we talk about what we're going to do using that money to try to get more millions. We're using our own money to build these SeaPods. We won't collect any money until after our first one is built and people can come down and walk around in it and try it out for themselves. Our goal is building these homes with one or two per month, so if anyone puts down their 20% deposit, they should be able to move in within a month. Ocean Builders is currently taking $100 refundable deposits for people to indicate their interest and reserve their place in line.
Previously we just had a check box on our website for people to indicate their willingness to buy (so we could gauge interest on whether to move forward with building a manufacturing site), while we had over 200 people indicate that they wanted to buy one, we decided to put in the refundable deposit option (following Tesla's example as they did with the Cybertruck) so that we could get a better indication of how serious people are about buying.
Once we have a community living on the water, we will be working with them on future plans. We already have a 1/3rd scale prototype for the open ocean. We are following flagging laws in Panama before putting that prototype in the open sea. We already tested a 1/3 scale prototype for the shallow water version. It's sitting in the marina right now.
We will be building LandPods.
As we began working on these, Ocean Builders' CEO ran into a wealthy land owner in Panama that had plans to build an eco-resort at his coffee plantation. He had plans for some tree houses but after seeing our design said he wanted our homes instead. So we are working with him to build about 10 of them for his resort. With the center tube only being 1.6m diameter, it's great for putting them on the ground in a place where a normal home would not do well, saving the trees from being cut down to make room for the home while being high enough to look out over the trees or be among the treetops with the parrots, monkeys and sloths. His order is helping us to kick start the build process knowing we have orders and can move forward. The design is almost exactly the same so as we move forward on those orders we can replicate the effort for our floating homes.
Whatever happened in Thailand, we proved that you can live on a floating home in middle of the ocean. The genie is out of the bottle on that one. The ocean is the next frontier. Not even the most corrupt navy can take away that fact.
