yeah, OTEC is complicated though, and it is essentially a turbine powered by a thermocline, it more or less could be said to be a variant of chimmney effect
but i generally agree, there is some awesome things you could do with floating settlements. i just think that you need to calculate in the potential of tidal movements that are more than 1SD outside of the range of recorded history, at least, this changes the equation of how you do it, a lot, like what happens if a bunch of tethered floating things suddenly need to spend a week or two sitting on the sand more or less directly under them, leveling them is gonna be a big problem... just one example... can you fx that with some kind of adaptable multi-leg prop system somehow, idk what would be required, tbh, it's a big problem
and what happens if your tethers put your vessels under water in a short term rise of water?
personally, i think the equations are simpler to solve if you are simply at 2km altitude or higher, the chances of water pushing your breathing level more than a kilometer further is nearly zero, at all, but in the sea, i think 2sd over the usual tidal movement is feasible boundaries for design
Could be wrong, but I think most of the ocean is deeper than high elevation land is high. Regardless, piles solve waves. A pile is a vertical thingy that floats in the water. The waves can do whatever they want, it just bobs up and down. A long horizontal thingy, like a barge, would get wrecked by waves applying force in different places, like holding a stick with both hands and kicking it. So with the pile, there must be some ratio of pile mass to attached mass that can be attached without endangering the structure with horizontal-ness. And if it gets really crazy, detach whatever is attached to the pile, and bring it back when the storm is done. Just an idea. Anyways, I think it's doable.
it basically a heavy mass with a particular anisotropy
it absorbs a lot of force in all directions but especially up and down
the thing is this doesn't address the problem that your things in between need to tolerate maybe as much as 100m of immersion and there needs to be a warning system that alerts the dwellers to enter and seal up for this case
as i see it, this is more practical with a tunnel burrowed into solid volcanic rock, at a high altitude, where you don't have to adapt to anything but merely need to breathe for a few weeks while everything is locked down
that's basically the countermeasure i see as most effective, unless you have gravity control and then all bets are off, a lot of things change in their difficulty because you can wrap a space in zero mass
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