Floating Island Harbor / Breakwater City

(Matias Volco) #1

Artificial Island, Ramform like shaped Island, Floating Island, Breakwater City / Harbour City

The goal of Seasteading and presumably this forum, is to explore and make a reality out of floating real estate to allow for a thousand nations to bloom (and implied, a diversity of ideas to coexist, inter-relate, or avoid each other - as Patri put it, have relations)
Floating Islands would create a trans-forming Floating Archipelago

A harbor shaped floating island would provide another scale-level for that archipelago and those levels of inter-dependence or interference (avoidance)

The concept of a superficial island makes more massive psychological sense/appeal to begin with than other perhaps safer and definitely more voluminous, underwater concepts.

Such a Harbor Island could begin as a very small platform shaped to maximize stability (picture Wilfried Ellmer showing affordable floating concrete structures)

continue as a boat-sized small island

grow into a building-sized island
as a single object:

or as a cluster:

and over time into a city sized archipelago (or cluster)

composed of many breakwater and breakaway elements like a city that coalesces or an “ocean encampment”

Seen from the bow of the island (the windward side) it would look massive and able to pierce and redirect waves,

Seen from the aft of the island(s) (the leeward side) it would look welcoming to economic activity

See more pictures of a Breakwater/Harbor City

and even more pictures of its possible variations

Picture the Ramform | get invested | get started | oceanic business alliance
Concrete Reinforced Geodesic Design
What about focussing on breakwaters?
WAVE-E "Wave Breaker" Contest
(.) #2

Nice picyures. I like them.

(Matias Volco) #3

Thank you, here are some more showing play and work

(.) #4

Did you create these pictures , yourself?

(Matias Volco) #5

Yes, you can see more at matiasvolco.com which links to a forum I created to showcase my designs based on floating concrete shells, as well as any other material or technique another contractor offers, as well as my earliest passion for boats’ superstructures.
Feel free to post there or use a section as your draftboard.

(Wilfried Ellmer) #6

Matias, this new picture series of yours is doing a absolut exquisit job to explain how a floating city is comming together and achieving a ongoing growth from a small and modest starting point



You should try individual units in the types of simulator software that Marine Architects use, to test their designs and further improve their desired characteristics.



What is the draft under this:

and how do you account for the load shedding when releasing a container?

(Matias Volco) #9

You may think of how a floating container terminal behaves and how a ship transport vessel works to get an approximation

But touche’ those are super post panamax cranes I modeled years ago. I believe a floating city of the size depicted might not need such big equipment, but rather jacks like these:


But i do not know how such a thing behaves, or why it behaves, or even if floating dock cranes exist in the size you propose to have, only that if you swing 20 tons off the side of a ship on a crane, the ship will roll some, depending of course on it’s gross size. I can imagine if you have the floating dock ballasted at level, and you reach out to the other side of a ship, 100ft away, and lift 10 tons off it’s deck or hold, your dock is going to roll. You would have shifting weights inside the dock, or water ballast and pumps, or what? Wouldn’t the dynamic weight control be easier to manage if the crane dock is wider?

I understood they are scaled to the size of the ship there. It’s often ok to scale any design down overall, like you have done there, but not scale any design up. In fact, the distributed legs and forces of the panamax crane would prolly help you in the design of the dock’s loadbearing systems. I personally hate singlepoint crane loads, they are ok for under a ton, in my opinion, and that’s about it. Nothing beats being able to control both ends of a load.

(Matias Volco) #11

wider, or an integral part of the Boomerang, triangular, part of the city

(Matias Volco) #12

Yes, if you’re making a technical diagram. If I want to picture a vision, bigger scale is often simply easier (from a photographer’s point of view), and more realistic smaller scale pictures more challenging. In any case, to your point, use this cranes for now:

Like words, images are also just a means of communication.

(Wilfried Ellmer) #13

Matias, the introduction of this “blue dome” into the image series was shere genius - this way the whole picture series gets a “marker” where the "edge of the bow and therefore the “wavebreaking against the city” is going on.

The introduction of architectonic glassfronts also gives the observer a clear perception that here we are talking of a “bow feature” of 5 stories height what matches or even exceeds a big ship bow in toughness against a brunt wave impact of a wave that exceeds the 15m predicted by the linear wave model and makes clear that your design points towards Schroedingers non linear model that is on the table now.

So introducing this “enormous bow feature marked by the unique blue dome” you make a clear statement to any marine engineer that you well understand what kind of impacts and fluid dynamics such a floating city needs to deal with. - a feature many of the “wana be designers” we have seen on the forums clearly seem NOT to understand embarasshing themselfs therefore with “non feasible fishpond designs” - OBVIOUS to any marine engineer.


Then bring on a certified Marine Engineer and a certified Naval Architect… Let experts have their say, and see how it reinforces the concept.


Right, because it’s obvious that glass is strong

and waves are easy to resist

and you are fine as long as the bow is into the wave

(Wilfried Ellmer) #16

@Matias what i like specificly about this picture is that it shows how you can deal with the problem of hog and sag forces in long ocean swells with wavelenghts that exceed 200m - in bringing the "outer wall gradually down and thinning its deplacement out you can limit the hog/sag - the train pod house configuration extending the arms of the ramform (frusha Boomerang) make clear that at a certain “armlenght” you need to allow some movement to avoid a breaking. It would be a design necessity to allow very long waves to go trough the city and move it instead of presenting resistence. …


This is not true. If anything, the stresses accumulate in the form of fatigue as the structure bends, causing it to crack sooner because there is less material where it matters to resist the hogging and sagging. Damnit Ellmer, you are not a marine engineer. Matias is a fine illustrator, amazing in fact, but he isn’t doing the engineering for the pictures.


Check out the destroyer in this video, and tell me how that glass bubble will take the pounding, and how any design of skinny boomerang arms will stay intact.


(Wilfried Ellmer) #19

@KatOnTri it probably slipped your attention that this ship of your own picture features “architectonic glassfronts” - to everybody who is not a “fool embarrassing himself” it should be clear that the “presence of such glassfronts” is limited to protected areas and the protection factor on the ramform is SUPERIOR to the protection on the ship…


Prove it…