Seasteading Option 4: Buying an old cruise ship
One more Seasteading strategy which has been explored by several groups, and seriously attempted by at least one group, is buying an older, used cruise ship and retrofitting it for long-term residential use. This has a lot of advantages from an up-front complexity and cost perspective, but ultimately operating complexity and costs are high enough that it’s difficult to make it work.
There’s a good set of precedents here: old ships (especially liners, famously the Queen Mary now in Long Beach and other obsolete ships, but also cruise ships) often get docked and used as “floating hotels”, either for events or on a longer-term basis. Since these ships are directly connected to shore, they can use shore power, water, sewage, and other infrastructure, and are essentially treated as a special type of structure — while they may be registered as boats and thus exempt from zoning and property tax in some places, they generally don’t need the same degree of crewing and seaworthiness of all systems as ocean-going ships.
However, for “Seasteading” use, it’s important to be more independent of local regulation than for a hotel ship, and thus greater autonomy from local infrastructure is needed — it essentially still needs to be operated as a ship. This presents difficulty: cruise ships are very expensive to operate, as they require high levels of staffing, and their systems must be maintained to very high levels in order to keep passengers safe. Essentially, aside from propulsion fuel costs, maintaining a cruise ship in international waters costs a comparable amount of money to regular cruise operations (less, but not substantially less), and the ship is inherently designed for short-stays by guests, so things like kitchens in cabins, higher levels of electrical supply, etc. are not available.
The ships generally available at low cost are the smallest and oldest. The economics of most cruise lines require the largest possible ships to amortize some fixed costs and facilities over the greatest number of paying passengers. As a result, the ships used for these projects tend to be the least adaptable to extended-duration living, with the most expensive systems to operate.
One project which went pretty far down the route to doing this was Ocean Builders purchase of the M/V Satoshi. Satoshi was built in 1991 as the Princess Cruise Lines Regal Princess, then P&O Pacific Dawn, and was purchased during Covid lockdowns in 2020 to be converted. The ship was sailed from Europe to Panama after some modest refits, and rooms started to be sold, but unfortunately the project couldn’t get insurance to keep the ship in international waters under the operating model, and thus wouldn’t be able to get crew or registry, and thus the project fell apart and the ship was sold (initially for scrap, but then purchased by a startup cruise line as the MS Ambience of the Ambassador Cruise line).
Overall, I think the economics of small/old cruise ship conversion generally don’t work. During a period where cruise ships of larger/newer type are available surplus (such as covid), it might tip toward viability, but it’s ultimately a tradeoff of lower up-front costs for higher operating costs. A purpose-built residential cruise ship will provide a much nicer experience to most guests, so it’s very hard to price cabins/apartments on a converted cruise ship high enough to cover the (higher) operating costs of the older vessel.
Cruise ships tend