Seasteading Option 5: Freedom Ship
Back when I was active on the Cypherpunks Mailing List in the 1990s, one of the projects being discussed was the “Freedom Ship”. Essentially, recognizing that retrofit cruise ships weren’t really economically viable (because the engineering plant, number of guests, etc. all were designed for a different mission, and the conversion wouldn’t be cheap enough per guest to make sense), and that small sailboats and yachts were very expensive per guest, this project decided to go for massive scale as a way to get low cost per guest, land-equivalent infrastructure, etc.
The idea has a website (http://freedomship.com/) and a wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_Ship) but I haven’t seen much activity. There never was much information on the system released publicly.
From what I can tell, the freedom ship was different from “just build a really big cruise ship” in a few key ways. It was built at a truly huge scale (4x bigger than the largest ships today), large enough that non-cable-arrested planes could use the top deck as an airport. It was to be built in modular sections and assembled (although many ships are built that way today). It wasn’t clear how the engineering plant would be specified (more shiplike? with lots of propulsion? or something more sustainable and designed to operate hotel loads rather than cruising). Overall, the lack of definitive information about the Freedom Ship makes it hard to tell what their plans were. From what I can tell they were planning to go for regular flagging as a ship, which would have required a classification society and insurance, which would have mandated certain standards for construction, and it’s hard to see how they could build something of that scale to those standards and have it be much less than 1/2 to 1/3 the cost of a new-build cruise ship. They claim to be built as a “flat bottomed barge with buildings on top” rather than as a ship (for cost savings and structural integrity reasons???), but I don’t understand the logic here; if the ship needs to withstand ocean conditions, it probably can’t be substantially less structurally sound than conventional ships.
Mostly, Freedom Ship didn’t work due to the startup problem — it required a huge amount of capital to build, and wouldn’t be useful to anyone unless the entire amount were raised and spent. There was both market risk (does anyone actually want to live on this?) and a lot of technical risk (due to novel shipbuilding techniques), and back in the 1990s, the demand for something like this was much less established than it is today. I actually think something like Freedom Ship (or other large-scale artificial-island or very-large-not-quite-ship Seasteads) could possibly work today, but only after small and medium sized seasteads have been built to prove demand and de-risk both the market and technology.