Why seasteading is hard...
"Where people go wrong is that they cannot imagine the strength of a hurricane compared to every day exposure.
For example, when fine weather waves of about 1m height pound on the beach, they dissipate an average of 10kW per metre of beach or the power of a small car at full throttle, every five metres. (Ref Douglas L Inman in Oceanography, the last frontier, 1974)
A three metre wave, by no means abnormal, dissipates about ten times that energy. As the energy in the waves increases with the fourth power of wind speed, a storm of 60 knots can produce waves of 15-20m (250 times the sample energy) and hurricanes of category four, with winds of 250 km/h, is again over ten times stronger. So an extreme event can dissipate hundreds, even thousands of times more energy than everyday events. Engineers, used to safety factors of three, have difficulty calculating structures that will stand the anger of the sea or these become unaffordable."
http://www.seafriends.org.nz/oceano/beacheng.htm
"Where people go wrong is that they cannot imagine the strength of a hurricane compared to every day exposure.
For example, when fine weather waves of about 1m height pound on the beach, they dissipate an average of 10kW per metre of beach or the power of a small car at full throttle, every five metres. (Ref Douglas L Inman in Oceanography, the last frontier, 1974)
A three metre wave, by no means abnormal, dissipates about ten times that energy. As the energy in the waves increases with the fourth power of wind speed, a storm of 60 knots can produce waves of 15-20m (250 times the sample energy) and hurricanes of category four, with winds of 250 km/h, is again over ten times stronger. So an extreme event can dissipate hundreds, even thousands of times more energy than everyday events. Engineers, used to safety factors of three, have difficulty calculating structures that will stand the anger of the sea or these become unaffordable."
http://www.seafriends.org.nz/oceano/beacheng.htm