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Off-grid self sufficient housing

Thanks for the link. That cabin is a fascinating example of applied engineering, wishful thinking, and First World blinders.

The Yale students who developed it think they can get the unit price down to $50,000. Anyone want to guess how many square feet of quonset huts I can build for that?

I'll also point out that while the inhabitants of Upper Slobbovia can assemble the cabin by hand, there is no way they can manufacture any of it components. Hail storm damages those solar panels? Mice burrow or critters nest in the electrical system? Extruded tubing for the rainwater collection and grey water distribution systems splits as it ages? Integral planters leak and the water damages the walls? Pumps fail? Fuses blow? Windows break? The structure settles? Cracks appear?

You better have the money to import the repair parts or your $50,000 cabin just became an overpriced chicken coop, cow byre, and tool shed.
 
agorski said:
A 30 ton modular cutter module?
Click to expand...

That's another option for "quick housing" on TL 0 New Upper Slobbovia. Like the off-grid, prefab cabin linked, it's neither "sustainable" nor "repairable" by New Upper Slobbovian standards.

It's an act of short time charity and not a long term solution.
 
coliver988 said:
I can see this for TL 9 or so, although eventually fusion works as well.

TL;DR: solar panel little house w/vertical farming for food supply for a self-sufficient abode.

https://www.dwell.com/article/ecological-living-module-gray-organschi-architecture-a4985a87?utm_medium=email&utm_source=postup&utm_campaign=Can%20we%20come%20over%20for%20dinner?&list=1
Click to expand...

Who puts up the $50,000 per unit and then maintains all of the pieces of it? Have these Yale students ever been out of the country? And do they understand that there are places in the world where there is actually cloud cover? That it typically takes about an acre of ground, not a few square feet, to provide sufficient food for one person for a year? That there is this thing called a rainy season in a large portion of the tropics where it does not rain for several months, and then rains a lot in a short period of time?
 
Whipsnade said:
I'll also point out that while the inhabitants of Upper Slobbovia can assemble the cabin by hand, there is no way they can manufacture any of it components. Hail storm damages those solar panels? Mice burrow or critters nest in the electrical system? Extruded tubing for the rainwater collection and grey water distribution systems splits as it ages? Integral planters leak and the water damages the walls? Pumps fail? Fuses blow? Windows break? The structure settles? Cracks appear?
Click to expand...
Indeed, it may be off grid, but hardly self-sufficient. Once things break (and they do break -- welcome to home ownership), your self-sufficiency is limited by how far you are from a parts store.
 
whartung said:
Once things break (and they do break -- welcome to home ownership), your self-sufficiency is limited by how far you are from a parts store.
Click to expand...


Not only how far you are from the store but whether the store will take a chicken for the roll of duct tape you need to "fix" the windows. ;)

The final picture in the series shows the "utility cupboard" the cabin requires. The equipment in it belies "So simple a child can do it" claims the students are making. There are storage batteries, pumps, power inverters, two different water filtration systems - with filters that will need regular replacement naturally - and even a dehumidifier.

There's a laptop too 'cause everyone in Lower Slobbovia needs a laptop just like all the Bulldogs enjoying the sun while working on their term paper in Hewitt Quadrangle. ;)
 
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At the risk of many on the board not understanding this - it is a yuppie-hut with no real world use whatsoever.

Show me an environmentally friendly way to economically manufacture rooftop sized solar panels and I'll sell you a unicorn farm.
 
Some of my ancestors lived in a sod house in the 1800s because there were no trees where they lived. No grid to be off of.

About 10 or so years ago I knew someone online who tried to convince several of us to put solar on our houses, its was a mere $30,000 and amortized over 20 years he was coming out ahead. It was a year later his employer transferred him, he had to sell his house at loss.

As for this 'cheap' house... its absurd nonsense.
 
I'm thinking tiny self-contained housing.......
only in the Oort Cloud, no solar power, but plenty of ice for fusion and oxygen and water.

Only problem out there is a lack of rock and metals. So ice homes and biotech are more the norm, if you can't grow it you likely won't have it.
Obviously there will have to be tech Out There, I expect a lot of piracy and scrounging in exchange for a LOT of illegal goods and services.


Aaaaand we're back to the what does TL mean, native production ability or economic capacity to import to common TL.
Perhaps the right answer is both or either, whatever it takes to have that TL be the common one.




Finally a thought- whether it's a well-meaning Yalie dumping an unsustainable housing solution that would at least misallocate resources to achieve their goal, a TL0 yurt yak-based economy, a TL8 suburban house with hydrocarbons driving everything, or a TL9 Oort ice station on fusion, the basics of housing will not stray far from what it's physical, economic and tech environment makes fiscally possible.

As world builders we should seek to be aware of what and why things like housing are the way they are, look for differences to describe and impact the players in ways mundane and adventurous to increase the suspension of disbelief and make them more real.
 
mike wightman said:
At the risk of many on the board not understanding this - it is a yuppie-hut with no real world use whatsoever.

Show me an environmentally friendly way to economically manufacture rooftop sized solar panels and I'll sell you a unicorn farm.
Click to expand...




Unicorn ranch- hmm, now I will HAVE to have a biotech branch dealing in researchers and businesses seeking to bring mythical creatures to life.


There would be a BIG market for unicorns- whether they should be able to talk as a feature, that might be a problem...
 
kilemall said:
Aaaaand we're back to the what does TL mean, native production ability or economic capacity to import to common TL. Perhaps the right answer is both or either, whatever it takes to have that TL be the common one.
Click to expand...


As always: It Depends and even then it's going to be more of a "blend" than all of one or all of the other.

With regular trade, comms, and travel limited to a few routes, settings using CT77, "Proto", and similar assumptions are going to tend more towards the former definition; "native production capabilities".

The "Bigger Everything" assumptions of CT81 and later versions will produce settings which will tend towards the latter; "economic capacity which supports enough imports to become commonplace".
 
agorski said:
A 30 ton modular cutter module?
Click to expand...

Not a bad short-term option. Certainly durable. I think it would last worry-free for about a year, then you'll have to schedule a maintenance man from offworld. This sort of maintenance would be a simple matter of swapping out modular components related to power and life support. I'll assume you can afford that sort of house call. Maybe get a group rate for your neighborhood?

If the thing sustains real damage, well, then there's a problem. But Traveller spacecraft are lightly armored, so more durable than a yuppie-hut.
 
agorski said:
A 30 ton modular cutter module?
Click to expand...
Still quite expensive for tract housing. An open module is 2 million credits. As a point solution for a technically savvy individual to live off the grid it might work - with substantial modification - if you happened to have access to a supply of junk ones that were no longer considered spaceworthy. At 2 million for a 6mx20m shed it's quite expensive.

My mother-in-law's ex husband built himself a small house in what is essentially a slum in Jakarta. It's 3 stories and a mezzanine (used for storage) tall, and the floor area is about 2mx3m on each level. Chances are it cost less than $1,000 to build. Average wages in Jakarta would run to about $200-300 pcm.

The construction is quite low-tech - wood frame with plywood floors and a corrugated iron roof. Power runs from a horrendously dangerous birdsnest of cabling on a switch board nailed to the wall of a building across the road. However, they still have a flat-screen TV, tablet, a playstation 3 console and the whole family have modern smart phones.

Some of the other parts of her family are quite wealthy - one, in particular was a successful businessman and had spend a substantial career working for an airline in Europe. He liked the coffee made by the little warung just around the corner (and it was nice coffee). Literally his favourite little coffee shop was situated in the middle of a slum in central Jakarta.

Jakarta is much more expensive than the rest of Indonesia (it's considered to be more expensive than Kuala Lumpur to live in). In Surakarta, where my wife was born, the average wage is about half of what it is in Jakarta.

As an aside, I got a taste for Hainese coffee from a chain called Killeny Street.1 This is based in Singapore (the original is located in the eponymous Killeny St) with a few dozen branches dotted around parts of asia.

Taking the segue further into coffee, I also had occasion to try a vietnamese drip. This is a little coffee filter gizmo that you sit on top of the cup. The coffee is made by putting coffee into the filter and pouring hot water through it. The low-tech angle is that you use condensed milk with the coffee, and need a fairly strong French roast (remember who used to be the colonial power in Vietnam) so the condensed milk doesn't overpower the taste.

It was designed as a solution to making coffee in a region where the power supply was not reliable enough to keep milk refrigerated. The result is quite pleasant, though.

1 To make a further segue into a location with a really quite cyberpunk vibe, the Killeny Street branch was located in a large apartment complex called Kalibata City2. The complex sits on 12ha of land and has about 20 apartment buildings and (by my back of an envelope calculation) something like 10,000 apartments.

If you want a feel for what living an arcology might be like, Kalibata city is quite self-contained in terms of facilities. There is at least one school, a shopping mall,3 laundry, pharmacies, convenience stores, 24hr takeaways and many more facilities on the site. In the more distant corners of the mall there are also small warungs that look quite like the small hole-in-the-wall shops you see in cyberpunk paintings. And, yes, quite a few of them sold or repaired electronic gadgets of one sort or another.

2 Website of the Kalibata City management - https://www.agungpodomoro.com/index.php?i=4&cid=11&po=1&pid=9&lang=ind&lang=eng
Wikipedia entry for Kalibata city https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalibata#Kalibata_city
Web page of residents association (bhasa) http://kalibatacity.or.id/ You will need to translate the pages.
Map of the area http://wikimapia.org/705558/Kalibata-City-Apartments-Shopping-Mall, https://www.google.com/maps/d/embed....85180700000001&spn=0,0&t=m&output=embed&z=17

3 The Indonesians really love their shopping malls - and they build at scale. Jakarta has dozens if not hundreds of large shopping malls. According to Wikipedia there are at least three in Jakarta larger than the Mall of America.
 
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City ordnance to enforce safety and sanitation regulations.

However:

DSC03789.0.jpg


5a620acf00d0efb4008b4841-750-496.jpg
 
If you put one of these down in the Solomon Islands, first, it will take three months to get there, and then it would need to be assembled and hooked up on some of the few cleared areas on the islands. Solar panels under a jungle canopy do not work very well. Then you will need to supply the work force to put it together, unless you set it up on Guadalcanal, and even that would be quite iffy. The other islands would be a lot more of a stretch, being a tad mountainous and forested. If you need a replacement part, that is either three months or a very expensive DXL delivery, along with someone to install said replacement part. That would be after you convince the government to expend rare American Dollars to purchase said part, or convince either the Australian or New Zealand governments to purchase it.

On most of the islands, water is not a problem. Too much moisture and humidity is more problematical. And then there are all of the insects that will love to take up residence. I would absolutely love to see one of these Yale students live for a month in one of these on the island of New Georgia, assuming that his or her head is not removed by a new local owner.
 
As has been pointed out, there are numerous problems with this being "self-sufficient". Perhaps the biggest addition that would be needed, would be a multi-material 3D printer able to convert local dirt into replacement parts. Said printer would be a minor miracle in and of itself (and make the whole thing more expensive), though, even if one could specify that sand and trace metals (to make replacement solar panels) were available.

(This would also require some degree of awareness of the typical conditions near the installation site. As has been pointed out, this particular example demonstrated a lack of that, but one can imagine a similar effort that actually does take into account said conditions.)

That said, for TL 9, that is some small high-tech colony that is already into the megacredits to set up and can make its own replacement parts (which sets it apart from the IRL design case in the article), I could see this working with a few modifications. At the least, it'd need more food production.
 
timerover51 said:
If you put one of these down in the Solomon Islands, first, it will take three months to get there, and then it would need to be assembled and hooked up on some of the few cleared areas on the islands. Solar panels under a jungle canopy do not work very well. Then you will need to supply the work force to put it together, unless you set it up on Guadalcanal, and even that would be quite iffy. The other islands would be a lot more of a stretch, being a tad mountainous and forested. If you need a replacement part, that is either three months or a very expensive DXL delivery, along with someone to install said replacement part. That would be after you convince the government to expend rare American Dollars to purchase said part, or convince either the Australian or New Zealand governments to purchase it.

On most of the islands, water is not a problem. Too much moisture and humidity is more problematical. And then there are all of the insects that will love to take up residence. I would absolutely love to see one of these Yale students live for a month in one of these on the island of New Georgia, assuming that his or her head is not removed by a new local owner.
Click to expand...

I sometimes watch shows where a city person; could be a reporter, archaeologist in training, a visitor; says a bunch of 'neat stuff' about how the locals living in a jungle or marginal area can improve their lives.

There is either someone behind them trying ver hard not to laugh, a tribal leader teling them they like the way they live, etc.

Sometimes, like a solar powered water pump for Africa where there is no electricity for miles/kilometers, do work out.

But mostly it is as you say, people making suggestions who have no idea what they are talking about.
 
In the Far Future, self sufficiency is having a Maker that can create a) a Maker and b) a Fusion power source.

Even if it has to work off of a stock of prepared bulk materials (that may well not be locally available immediately), having that kind of capability would be great for a boot strap colony.

The game is to then come up with the processes and resources to be able to continuously feed the Maker.

At that point, you're Done, and it's just a matter of time and labor to get things truly rolling.

The standard then would be to deliver 2 such Makers each with their own power source. Both are ideally reliable units, and allow you to repair the other should they fail.

A Maker without a power source is piece of sculpture, a power source without a maker is versatile, yes, but now living on borrowed time in a new land if the rest of the infrastructure is not in place. Having redundant systems will protect against "routine failure", but you should separate the systems geographically so that freak earthquake or tsunami doesn't take both units out at once.

As most folks know, a lathe is considered a self-replicating tool. In that with a lathe, you can now make other lathes. If you start with a crude lathe, you can make finer and finer lathes.

How apt that works with Makers, I don't know. What kind of refined resources are required to feed Makers, I don't know. At some point, it's better to send the finished goods than the raw resources to make them planet side. But, since space transport is limited as much by volume as by mass, perhaps shipping raw materials and the means to make the finished goods is better for situation like a colony where time is a large resource that they have.
 
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