It's about 2 aircraft carriers long, so not totally impossible as far as size. 5kt speed would make me very nervous about running aground on a lee shore when the gale picks up.
I usually try to be constructive regarding crazy ideas, but I have spent some time on the ocean and 5kts is a giant red flag for me. I would assume that it could maybe be workable if it stayed hundreds of km away from land/shallows unless accompanied by a flotilla of large tug boats.
Also: "Pangeos will be perpetually itinerant around our planet Earth."
Not sure how they could do that. It is larger than Panamax and Suezmax. The only other choice is going around the southern Capes and that is not something I can imagine doing in a ship limited to anything close to 5kts. The average wind speeds there are around 30kts.
Small sailboats with hull speeds near 5 knots regularly and safely circumnavigate the globe, and can weather storms, and navigate the southern capes. Without engineering details on why it’s limited to 5 knots there’s no reason to think that’s a red flag. 5 knots is a speed against current, and ocean currents are much much less than that. Perhaps (likely) it would be able to still do 5 knots upwind in a storm.
Also, ships, particularly sailing ships/boats, have hull forms with significantly less drag in the direction they're trying to go, vs sideways. This things, shaped like a giant tortoise with those massive (presumably rigid ) flippers, not so much.
I don't understand your concern here. Sailboats can only sail ~45 degrees to the wind. This is a powerboat, so it can motor any direction, including directly upwind. Assuming the 5 knots is a hydrodynamic limitation of the (admittedly very silly) hull design rather than an engine power limitation (most likely, because you could always spec a more powerful motor), the boat could still go 5 knots any direction, including directly upwind into a storm.
Just because a boat is slow doesn't mean it can't handle a storm, even more-so with powerboats than sailboats. Case in point, look at old fashioned displacement trollers, e.g. an old wooden salmon troller. These usually have an ~8 knot top speed yet can run directly upwind into a storm for days on end with no problem, at almost exactly the same speed as they would go downwind... because the speed limitation is entirely from the hull speed and not affected by wind. Boats like that have been weathering the worst ocean storms for over a hundred years safely and reliably.
Yes, but that displacement troller has a hull shaped like, well, a proper boat (or ship). I doubt the troller would be making significant forward speed against storm wind and seas if it was wider than it was long, like this abomination.
You're absolutely right, the skeuomorphic sea turtle shape is ridiculous, and this boat is a terrible idea. My disagreement here is only that a 5 knot top speed is not, by itself, a reason to dismiss a boat design without any other information.
This design is basically a square aspect ratio. One of the reasons one turns into the the wind is to reduce windage. Because this design is square, you get no real benefit from doing that. But that's just in a storm event, which would probably be fine way out to sea.
If you only have 5kts of speed to throw at the problem of navigation, you will almost always be getting pushed down wind. Again, this could be resolved with a bunch of very powerful tugs, which I suppose could escort the "ship" through troublesome areas. As in, anywhere near land or shallows.
Say there is a 30 knot wind blowing. You negate 5 knots of that. Now you are moving at a maximum of 25 knots in the wrong direction. Of course, this is limited by the hull speed, but I don't think it's the hull speed that limits this design to 5kts. So say it can get pushed through the water at 10 knots by the insane amount of energy absorbed via windage... that's 240 nautical miles per day. Possibly in the wrong direction! That's 444km or 276 miles. Assuming the wind could blow for 5 days in a direction towards land, that's a lot of distance from shore until the captain is happy.
Even if the hull speed is 5 knots, that's still a big problem once you multiply by time.
Interesting to think that even if the project ran over budget and ended up costing double at $16 billion, Elon Musk could have built two of these and still had some billions to spare instead of buying twitter for $44 billion.
I just skimmed it. Folks are having fun. :) The question isn't what material to use, it's how big do you have to be (with a given material) to float? You can always just make your sphere bigger, eh? (That's kinda the point. It would actually be really really inconvenient to live in a Cloud Nine, no?)
Anyway, I'm also going to use kites. (E.g. Imagine the Cloud Nine with a skirt like the Rings of Saturn, rotating, with the individual "cells" of the kite membrane modulated to afford directional control... Or Magnus Effect "cilia" that manipulate the envelope of air around the sphere...)
>The "UNREAL ESTATE" is a NFT crowdfunding project, by paying in cryptocurrency it is possible to purchase virtually the selected space.
>This will generate an initial budget to step into a more sophisticated augmented reality, the Pangeos metaverse.
LOL
Like I've said before, I am angry at my dumb brain every single day because it is too dumb to come up with ways to scam schmucks out of their money....
The article missed out on the details I was keen to hear.
A) power source? Electric motors so I'm assuming a mix of solar and wind? Or diesel? I'm guessing not nuclear.
B) docking. Can something this large (width more than length) actually be docked? From the shape I'm guessing "mostly no". So provisioning, embarking and so on is done via ferry? In open water? That might be fun. So actually visiting various places (getting off) might be very constrained.
C) dry-docking. I'm going to assume it can only be dry docked in the place it was built. That's fine for planned maintainence, but perhaps a problem if she became unseaworthy far from home.
D) is this a holiday cruise ship? Is it supposed to be permanent residence? If holiday seems like a poor alternative to an actual cruise ship (no / Minimal port docking?). If a permanent residence then it also seems like a poor choice. Limited access to everything (no overnight amazon delivery for you), very limited job opportunities, not sure what it's "exporting" to pay for the fuel. So I'm guessing not self-sustaining, so basically reliant on land for food/fuel? And cash. So permanent if you start mega-rich and don't need money. But if you're mega-rich why go on this thing? Why not just get your own yacht?
A) Many large ships run with electric motors and diesel generators anyway, so it would be unsurprising if this ship did the same.
B) I'm sure they can carry fairly large swanky launches / tenders / whatever
C) This is interesting to me also. I suppose you could build a coffer dam around it anywhere you have a large enough shallow harbor. But even conventional large ships spend a lot of their time far away from any shipyard big enough to repair them, maybe it's just an accepted difficulty.
D) The $8-billion question, yes? The page doesn't seem to address this at all. It seems to be one designer's idle fantasy and a bunch of renders.
Embarking is answered in this video the project put out. looks like a combination of 'drone pods' that land on the helicopter pads on the back legs. ( the pads seem to be partly tucked under the overhang of the upper stage? that doesn't seem safe for anybody ) and a tunnel through the side that enters the docking area in the center of the ship that looks like it would be fun to pilot through.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XT_3YmlXvOI
Yes if you count per km travelled, maybe. But if it aimlessly floats for years and you count tons of co2 per year per person... Maybe it's not that bad.
General consensus is to shit on cruise ships, but I feel they are actually quite efficient. Fitting 5000people, basically entire town on a few hundred square meters is an amazing feat.
On the open ocean, the containment that keeps the 5000 people from driving everywhere is free and perceived as idyllic. On land, attempts to contain 5000 people and prevent them from driving would be costly and considered dystopian.
The Raft was a bunch of smaller ships clustered together wasn’t it? That seems a much more sensible approach than a floating monolith. Start small - buy a boat and see if you can convince other people to tie their boats to yours.
Oh I missed that fine print, I thought those brands were at least loosely engaged. That was actually the only thing adding credibility for me, oh well.
> How are you going to dispose of trash and waste?
An answer may be found in Mykle Hansen's novella "Crazy Shitting Planet", where the rich live in such structures in the air and just let it all rain on the rest of the world.
Obviously satire, but not really contradicted by the historical record.
The largest cruise ship ever built is about to go in the bin without a single passenger ever setting foot on board. If they really think this can work, they could do a PoC using that.
plans also included the use of artificial intelligence (A.I.) for many customer-facing services while also using facial recognition systems to minimize queueing
I don't think that ship is anything special. Or revolutionary. It is just that company run out of money before getting to expensive part that is interior.
I noticed that too. Which makes me see the project as more of a giant cruise ship than a floating EPCOT (Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow).
A giant cruise ship isn't very exciting. Whereas, a floating city where the government employees get to live the same quality of life as the residents would be something interesting.
If you go under "Unreal Estate", they're selling NFT's of the gigaturtle's various accommodations, and say they plan to expand into the metaverse (there's a countdown timer to release!), where they'll do more of the same. The NFT's (of which it doesn't look like many have sold) will fund Meta development, and the El Dorado that is Meta will open the floodgates and generate enough dough to start actual planning...
It's a freakin' gigaturtle folks! There are reasons why real ships don't look like this. Ever. It's exceedingly unlikely that the makers of this site are serious about anything other than selling NFT's and maybe testing the waters with Meta.
The spelling and grammar mistakes don't exactly fill one with confidence either haha. Their social links also don't work. There have been many attempts at things like this in the past and they tend to go nowhere unless backed by very wealthy and powerful people.
For reference, this claims it needs a projected 8 billion in funding, which is around the total estimated size of the nft market.
>Immagine to join together the world biggest yacht firms in an unique project.
>(None of the below brands are now involved yet in the project)
This text is accompanied by logos of companies which are NOT involved and probably never even heard of this project. I highly doubt they can build anything.
The 8 billion needed to build a monstrosity like that seems possible, but doing it in 8 years? I don't thinks so. There are way too many technical challenges to solve and there is no shipyard in the world which could construct it in one piece. Making it modular, would be possible, but not in this time frame.
And the design for the ship is terrible, no maritime engineer would sign that off.
The missing figure on the website is an estimate of the amount of greenhouse gases emitted for this project, both during construction and throughout its operation.
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[ 0.17 ms ] story [ 202 ms ] threadhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very_large_floating_structure
Stick an A1B reactor in her belly and sign me up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A1B_reactor
I usually try to be constructive regarding crazy ideas, but I have spent some time on the ocean and 5kts is a giant red flag for me. I would assume that it could maybe be workable if it stayed hundreds of km away from land/shallows unless accompanied by a flotilla of large tug boats.
Also: "Pangeos will be perpetually itinerant around our planet Earth."
Not sure how they could do that. It is larger than Panamax and Suezmax. The only other choice is going around the southern Capes and that is not something I can imagine doing in a ship limited to anything close to 5kts. The average wind speeds there are around 30kts.
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Worldwide-average-wind-s...
Yes, SAIL boats which can configure their sails to move in directions other than downwind.
Just because a boat is slow doesn't mean it can't handle a storm, even more-so with powerboats than sailboats. Case in point, look at old fashioned displacement trollers, e.g. an old wooden salmon troller. These usually have an ~8 knot top speed yet can run directly upwind into a storm for days on end with no problem, at almost exactly the same speed as they would go downwind... because the speed limitation is entirely from the hull speed and not affected by wind. Boats like that have been weathering the worst ocean storms for over a hundred years safely and reliably.
It's like an upscaled version https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_monitor_Novgorod except made for parting schmucks from their money instead of serving some military purpose.
(Well, in it's defence it seems at least the submerged part of it has some resemblance to, well, a hull form. Or several hulls bolted together.)
If you only have 5kts of speed to throw at the problem of navigation, you will almost always be getting pushed down wind. Again, this could be resolved with a bunch of very powerful tugs, which I suppose could escort the "ship" through troublesome areas. As in, anywhere near land or shallows.
Say there is a 30 knot wind blowing. You negate 5 knots of that. Now you are moving at a maximum of 25 knots in the wrong direction. Of course, this is limited by the hull speed, but I don't think it's the hull speed that limits this design to 5kts. So say it can get pushed through the water at 10 knots by the insane amount of energy absorbed via windage... that's 240 nautical miles per day. Possibly in the wrong direction! That's 444km or 276 miles. Assuming the wind could blow for 5 days in a direction towards land, that's a lot of distance from shore until the captain is happy.
Even if the hull speed is 5 knots, that's still a big problem once you multiply by time.
Especially if you have tons of space like here.
They would even need to build a special construction factory/port, that alone could cost much more than 8 billion.
What monuments are we leaving for future generations? Why isn't anyone building a Great-Pyramid-of-Giza sized project every hundred years?
(It's mostly a stunt to show humanity that we can do great things.)
https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/36667/can-...
Anyway, I'm also going to use kites. (E.g. Imagine the Cloud Nine with a skirt like the Rings of Saturn, rotating, with the individual "cells" of the kite membrane modulated to afford directional control... Or Magnus Effect "cilia" that manipulate the envelope of air around the sphere...)
>The "UNREAL ESTATE" is a NFT crowdfunding project, by paying in cryptocurrency it is possible to purchase virtually the selected space.
>This will generate an initial budget to step into a more sophisticated augmented reality, the Pangeos metaverse.
LOL
Like I've said before, I am angry at my dumb brain every single day because it is too dumb to come up with ways to scam schmucks out of their money....
A) power source? Electric motors so I'm assuming a mix of solar and wind? Or diesel? I'm guessing not nuclear.
B) docking. Can something this large (width more than length) actually be docked? From the shape I'm guessing "mostly no". So provisioning, embarking and so on is done via ferry? In open water? That might be fun. So actually visiting various places (getting off) might be very constrained.
C) dry-docking. I'm going to assume it can only be dry docked in the place it was built. That's fine for planned maintainence, but perhaps a problem if she became unseaworthy far from home.
D) is this a holiday cruise ship? Is it supposed to be permanent residence? If holiday seems like a poor alternative to an actual cruise ship (no / Minimal port docking?). If a permanent residence then it also seems like a poor choice. Limited access to everything (no overnight amazon delivery for you), very limited job opportunities, not sure what it's "exporting" to pay for the fuel. So I'm guessing not self-sustaining, so basically reliant on land for food/fuel? And cash. So permanent if you start mega-rich and don't need money. But if you're mega-rich why go on this thing? Why not just get your own yacht?
Sooo many questions... But ultimately I wonder;
A) who wants this thing? B) can they afford it?
https://www.seaborg.com/
B) I'm sure they can carry fairly large swanky launches / tenders / whatever
C) This is interesting to me also. I suppose you could build a coffer dam around it anywhere you have a large enough shallow harbor. But even conventional large ships spend a lot of their time far away from any shipyard big enough to repair them, maybe it's just an accepted difficulty.
D) The $8-billion question, yes? The page doesn't seem to address this at all. It seems to be one designer's idle fantasy and a bunch of renders.
Can be produced en masse and co2-free by big fission reactors & renewables.
Although having SMRs directly power ships would be cool too.
General consensus is to shit on cruise ships, but I feel they are actually quite efficient. Fitting 5000people, basically entire town on a few hundred square meters is an amazing feat.
Gotta run. Got pizza to deliver.
lol. i'm having a hard time believing this is anything other than the imaginings of some 15-year-old
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm_Islands
[2] https://www.neom.com/en-us/regions/theline
1/3 of it is realised, the remaining 2/3 have no apparent future, and all have had horrendous ecological effects
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_Ship
How are you going to dispose of trash and waste?
It will have to be kept close to shore near a sizable port and have constant stream of supply and waste ferry traffic.
An answer may be found in Mykle Hansen's novella "Crazy Shitting Planet", where the rich live in such structures in the air and just let it all rain on the rest of the world.
Obviously satire, but not really contradicted by the historical record.
Which, of course, they won't.
https://interestingengineering.com/culture/9000-passenger-cr...
Not sad to see that bit scrapped.
https://metro.co.uk/2022/09/01/global-dream-ii-worlds-bigges...
It's a sad story from many angles - technical, environmental, political, economic.
https://www.cruiseindustrynews.com/cruise-news/28788-disney-...
A giant cruise ship isn't very exciting. Whereas, a floating city where the government employees get to live the same quality of life as the residents would be something interesting.
It's a freakin' gigaturtle folks! There are reasons why real ships don't look like this. Ever. It's exceedingly unlikely that the makers of this site are serious about anything other than selling NFT's and maybe testing the waters with Meta.
Well, I'm really not sure how well this works out considering that the sea is one of the most regulated entities on the globe.
For a sobering read I recommend this article about the Satoshi. "The world's first crypto currency cruise ship" : https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/sep/07/disastrous-voya...
For reference, this claims it needs a projected 8 billion in funding, which is around the total estimated size of the nft market.
>WE CAN BUILD IT !
>Immagine to join together the world biggest yacht firms in an unique project.
>(None of the below brands are now involved yet in the project)
This text is accompanied by logos of companies which are NOT involved and probably never even heard of this project. I highly doubt they can build anything.
The 8 billion needed to build a monstrosity like that seems possible, but doing it in 8 years? I don't thinks so. There are way too many technical challenges to solve and there is no shipyard in the world which could construct it in one piece. Making it modular, would be possible, but not in this time frame.
And the design for the ship is terrible, no maritime engineer would sign that off.