Topic: stateless seasteaders existed for hundreds of years, we just need to join them (Read 2934 times)

if you're sailing you've got plenty of power from the prop shaft or a towed generator, and no problem with ac or refrigeration.  Your sails generate more power than any windmill. 

When you want to sit still in a bay or a harbor though, and you would prefer not to be hooked up to shore power, the power requirements for either would be a problem.  There's where the big-ass windmill  generator (or a diesel genset) becomes necessary.  And even that is iffy because bays and harbors are subject to only the gentlest breezes, not the kind of wind that generates big power. 

You can bank enough in your battery bank to run a refrigerator for a couple days.  And that's even with old-fashioned lead batteries; I hear the new ones are a lot more power per pound.   Airconditioning draws more than three times as much power as refrigeration but it is, IMO, completely unnecessary because the water mediates the temperature.  Even in the middle of summer when it's breaking 110 degrees Fahrenheit in Fresno, the air out over the Pacific, or in San Francisco Bay, is rarely more than 75 degrees.  I guess it gets hotter in the tropics, but I've never been further south than Acapulco.  Anyway, I'm baffled when people run airconditioners in boats. But they do.

If you told me you wanted to keep a boat cool inside, and I were designing the boat, I would circulate fluid through a metal keel and a network of copper tubing mounted right under the deck.  That would effectively keep the interior of the boat not much warmer than the actual water, which is plenty cold enough for most people, and it would require a hell of a lot less power than an airconditioner.  But I've never heard of a boat that actually does that.  Hmmm, it might cause condensation, which is usually bad for the interior of boats - it can promote mold etc. if not captured.    Then again, condensation is free fresh water if you can capture it effectively. 

i think tidal power is probably not the way to go in open ocean. we are really looking at a combination of wind and solar. you know if you were mostly stationary than you could afford to use wind collection devises that add an amount of drag that would generally be unfeasible on a boat that spent most of its time underway.

i mean i think we all know that we would have to sacrifice some luxuries. it wouldn't be an easy life. it would be a life for freedom junkies who were willing to make some major sacrifices. but there are a couple of things that i dont think anyone would be willing to sacrifice. with a combination of these technologies and effective rationing do you think that you would be able to run some ac and a refrigerator and a couple of electronic devices?

also its important to note that it would be hardest for the forerunners and marginally easier for each additional migrant than the one before. eventually we would start to have a real economy with devision of labor. likely in time entrepreneurs would open power plant barges and sell electricity.

nice addition to the conversation.

Maybe worth talking battery tech, too. LiFePO4 has finally become widespread in manufacturing, and it's exceptionally well-suited to this kind of application. Costs are falling quickly (they're competitive with LiPO, though not LiCoO2 ["Li-ion"], which is fine given all its drawbacks), and you shouldn't, for years, have issue with going from frequent discharge and recharge. They're relatively safe and have a fairly constant discharge rate (with regards to voltage). They make for some excellent batteries which are relatively new and thus have a lot more room to fall in price.

Things have really advanced quite a bit in this space in the past 5-10 years.

Oh, yeah, I almost forgot:

http://www.emarineinc.com/categories/Solar-Panels/

Solar panels are the rule rather than the exception on modern boats.  At least 70% of the boats you find in any marina will have some of these new high-efficiency panels that are tough enough to walk on, usually either on the deck or on the doghouse.  They're handy, quiet, and very low-maintenance, and they provide enough power to run your critical electronics systems (or if you're rigged with the new LED running lights, can store enough in your batteries to keep your lights running all night). 

That said, they don't provide very much power.  If you want something power-hungry like refrigeration or, god forbid, air conditioning, then you need to have something else.  I sort of hate guys who make noise and stink by running diesel generators at anchor in an otherwise quiet harbor, but if they want to run a refrigerator or an airconditioner, and don't have a big wind generator, that's what they usually wind up doing.

You should post some pics of your vessel.

Uh, marine wind turbines: 

http://www.emarineinc.com/categories/Wind-Turbines/Marine-Wind-Turbines/

These are common and getting more common. Lots of cruisers use them. An alternator hooked up to a propeller blade, what's not to like?

Marine towed generators/turbines:

http://www.wire-wiz.com/id84.html

These provide electrical power from sail (if you're on the ocean) or from current (if you're anchored in a river) or from tides (if you're anchored at the mouth of a bay or tidal lagoon).  I don't use these, and In practical terms I don't like them;  deploying, recovering, and stowing these towed generators is a pain in the tush (especially if you want to recover it without stopping the boat).

I much prefer running a generator off the prop shaft in all of these situations; it's simple and easy and skips all the deploy/recover/stow hassle, and provides more power, if your boat is set up for it.  It's an even bigger win if your boat uses an electric motor; that way you don't even need a generator as a separate machine.  OTOH, with an electric motor you can't just buy fuel and then run the motor for hundreds of miles on a windless day the way you can with an internal combustion motor.

But most sailboats aren't built for that;  to make it practical you have to be getting enough power to overcome the friction where the prop shaft goes through your stuffing box, and there are bad logistical issues involved in getting belts on or off the prop shaft if one ever breaks because without unmounting the motor or unmounting the prop and shaft itself, you can't get a new belt over the shaft.  And in most sailboats you have to crawl around teeny spaces under the lazarette to even get at the part of the prop shaft where you could mount a pulley, so it's a real pain in the ass to install or maintain.  Finally you have to mount a prop that's a bit wider (and causes more drag) than would be necessary just to transmit motor power to the water, and that involves modifications to your skeg and rudder to accomodate the larger size prop.

So setting up your boat to easily and conveniently generate electrical power off the prop shaft involves major, expensive alterations, or a customized boat build.

But there are people who specialize in exactly that:  http://www.electricyacht.com/

you would probably have to be a little bit too close to the shore. i bet the basic design of the wind turbine i linked up there could be applied to creating a marine turbine.

Those big red snakes maybe?
http://youtu.be/fet4bCYvmLw

The thing is all of those are closed sourced patented solutions.

we would probably need something that could be dangled from the bottom of the vessel by a tether. idk if you could do that with the turbine from the video but maybe. What ever solution one comes up with it must be mobile. it can be rooted to the sea floor like what we see in the video.

How about tidal energy?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Iq-h4ShZ8s

Nifty indeed, but not new. As a biologist, I would like to give credit where credit is due - reverse osmosis was invented by kidneys millions of years ago 


I suppose a combination of solar, wind and current, together with cheap filtration devices for water, could start making seasteading seem more sustainable...

we could also intentionally create the community where there was a strong current. that way we could simply drop a tethered Marine Current Turbine from the bottom of our vessel and get a lot of power that way.

Not really.  Water makers already exist, and we use them on boats all the time.  They're only moderately expensive when you're buying one, and the filters are easy to clean, cheap to replace, and last a couple years in constant use assuming you don't try to filter oily water, polymers, or other artificial pollutants.  Here's a link:

http://www.spectrawatermakers.com/products/all_marine.html

These are filtration systems, not distillation systems.  Turns out that if you set up a reverse osmosis filter (they call them 'membranes' but they're rigid, about a quarter-inch thick, and look like fiberglass-reinforced plastic) and put 150 pounds of pressure or so behind it, you can keep saltwater on one side and make it ooze fresh water out the other side.  The nifty invention that allowed them to become practical was circulating seawater through the pressure chamber without loss of pressure - as opposed to having a pressure chamber that gets saltier and saltier as the filter works. 

Anyway, marine watermakers are mostly operated by electric motors.  But there are hand-cranked and hand-pumped versions sufficient for remaining hydrated for long durations on lifeboats (although you have to crank that damn thing six hours a day to get enough to drink) and several of my cruising buddies have put a belt pulley on their prop shaft to run them off the main motor or by sail power - if you're moving under sail and you don't have a feathering prop, the prop spins and you can get significant power from the prop shaft without running the motor.  Of course it slows down the boat, but these are cruisers, not racers.  If they can take a clean freshwater shower or two on the way,  and have plenty of freshwater to cook with, they don't much care if they get to Cabo a few hours later.

I dont think any single approach would be right. You would probably want to use solar where you could but most of your power would have to come from a wind turbine. there is a ton of wind power at sea. i really dont think power would be a big issue as windy as it is out there. you would probably want to use these kind to keep your boat from capsizing. http://hacknmod.com/hack/next-gen-wind-energy-you-have-never-seen/

you dont see sailboats using wind power now because it would create too much drag while traveling. but if your boat spent a lot of time anchored at sea than it would become practical.

I if I were smart I would invent a sailboat that would double as a flexible solar panel fabric...

That's a very cool concept boat, but I don't think it's meant for a lot of people to live on for long periods of time... And look at all that surface area covered with PV cells. I bet it still delivers less energy than a normal diesel engine.
Not to mention reliability - what do you do on a cloudy day?

By the way, I wonder if you could get boats to extract energy from waves while they're anchored down?

This doesn't look basic.
http://mobile.theverge.com/2013/6/22/4454980/ms-turanor-planetsolar-solar-powered-boat-photo-essay
And I think that boat has been around a few years already.

Actually good PV cells already get to well over 10%. I doubt the efficiency will increase more than 3-fold in the foreseeable future. But maybe that will be enough for basic functions...

It requires a lot of surface area now.  I believe solar cell conversion rates are low single digits and battery tech isn't that good either but solar tech is growing fast.  There already exists a few big boats that are only solar powered.  5-10 years and smaller boats will be able to do the same.