I would like to retake the topic of the technology baseline in the light of the San Christobal project in Cartagena
I would like to suggest barge building as a side-job to the seapods.
The concrete barge building baseline is this…
Building and selling that kind of barges can be a good and lucrative business on its own.
From what we have seen in cartagena the infrastructure for building and handling that kind of barges over roll bags is a straight forward process that needs no infrastructure beyond a sandy beach.
Build one of those per week and float it out with the technology we studied seems to be in the range of what linton bay as it is could handle.
The value of such a barge is around usd 150.000 the building cost can be kept a third of that .
So a profit of 100.000 per week is on the table of possibilities.
Does not look bad to me for a sidejob to the seapods.
The market for it in the area between panama and cartagena looks quite unlimited.
Especially if we fit them out with 2 truck engines as a autopropelled version that can travel
everywhere in the caribbean.
From what we have seen in the cartagena fact finding mission the paperwork is manageable and can be done in a day.
The foto they published suggests, that it would be convenient to start that build with a series
of barges as described. ( As base for the buildings on top )
As soon as the first construction layer (of barges) is on the water surface - basicly any
concrete contractor on the planet can build with his “technology as usual” on the barges…
The barges in their “deckbarge version” can be used for floating restaurants and similar
ventures. There is a almost unlimited stream of possible customers who could put a “space on the watersurface” to good use and would pay for having one.
Here an example of a deck barge converted in floating restaurant
It is obvious that this restaurant will not be well served with a steel barge that needs to
come out of the water every 3-6 months to have its (mandatory) inspection cycles.
What you will want is something that can be put into the water and then stay in the water for decades like the concrete walkways in linton bay marina.
The floating line of this concrete box suggest that everything is built in heavy mass concrete
with thick walls - just like the monaco breakwater.
Casting that amount of massive concrete is certainly not cheap.
The inner makings - a honeycomb structure - for a deckbarge this is the kind of
structure that allows to have several loaded trucks on deck.
p.k Mehta floating concrete structures
| massive floating concrete building on that scale is not cheap |
An alternative way of concrete construction - the walls are only 4 mm thick
This means that you use a factor 100 less material to get the same amount of square meters floating on the watersurface.
In consequence this technology comes a factor 100 more economic than the heavy standard cast stuff along the lines of the monaco breakwater.
Wenn you pretend to build something the size of a 7km x 7km floating city with a 49 million square meters the cost per squaremeter becomes a “paramount cost factor”…and therefore key driver for almost everything.
It is not that i suggest to “abandon the massive standard concrete building method completly”
It is rather that i want to point out, that this is not the endpoint of the “advanced cement composite technology evolution”.
And much more advanced (and spectacular) stuff can be done.
My suggestion would be to start with the established baseline of mass concrete building and take it from there.
When you build a city the engineers will want their structural concrete beams similar to land building …
They will accept advanced cement composite technology like our Floating-Rock™ only as fill in material between their “structural beams”
If we follow the picture published by the oxagon marketing group it looks like the pimary intention is that the floating base should carry something like a light 2 story building.
A much lighter floating base (like shown in the triangular piece) can carry that.
The light stuff like shown in the triangle needs a high grade of specialization
This also opens the door to argue that we are not a “simple concrete contractor” casting prefab mix into plywood forms
But we do advanced cement composite technology … that has a propietary technology component.
But as any voyage this starts with a simple first step - and building barges as suggested - could be this first step - being good business with high ROI from the very beginning …
more about :
advanced light shell building | advanced cement composite technology
more stuff to follow…
comments apreciated…
concrete barge with light two stories building on top of it | that is more or less what the oxagon image is talking about |
| concrete deck barge as wharf | pier extension |
concrete barges as pier extension | cartagena colombia | cruise ship port |
seasteading is floating port infrastructure development
context:
| concrete deck barge | recieving a truck |
rudi, that is about the equivalent of your barge san cristobal - you understand the value of such a barge in the caribbean…so building those barges can be great business …
