Taking it mobile

As an alternative to physical buildings and workspaces - how about mobile solution. Take a 53' semi trailer that used to be a refrigeration unit to allow for air conditioning. Line the inside of one wall with computer screens and work tables. Add clean sine wave generators to produce the power on several 50 amp circuits. Add solar panels on the roof and the sides of the trailer to add extra power.

Available Space

The Power  Plant

Water Batteries

The water battery approach allows you to save water to be used as power when the sun isn't shining. On a sunny day, the mobile power trailer solar panels takes in rays of the sun, translates it to energy and sends the power to the water pump. The pump then draws the water up the black pipe and stores it in the barrels above the water wheel. Once the barrels are full they can be stored for a cloudy day and then the water can be released to turn the water wheel which will in turn generate electricity to fill the batteries in the mobile power station following the yellow path in the central portion of the image below. Next, the power is transferred to the mobile computing center so that the pc's and monitors can run. Excluding the possibility for evaporation, this is almost a perpetual motion machine - at least for our intents and purposes. There is always power loss somewhere as nothing runs at 100% effectiveness. If however, you had a stream near by where the water could be replenished, then you could have power all the time. Take your imagination one step further, what if the water wheel had hydraulics for raising it up and down and there was an outlet gate to the reservoir and an incoming stream could feed it. That way you have multiple options for power. If the creek dries up in the summer, you could bring in water from a distance location in a tanker truck. Add some wind mills and you being to have a "well oiled" machine for producing power from multiple options. There is no reason why you couldn't put solar panels on the mobile computing trailer as well - you would simply run a power transfer cable from the Mobile Computing trailer to the battery storage system or run some of the computers directly off of the solar panels themselves. The idea is to make the system as versatile as possible so that you have enough power in any condition.

Remote Sleeping Quarters

Create sleeping quarters for a larger crew in another trailer to extend room beyond the size of a standard semi-sleeper behind the cab. This design adds 15 sleeping locations in addition to the driver. You would have to measure carefully but you could put a second row on the other side of the trailer and double your sleeping arrangements to the the toon of 30. Once again solar panels could be added on the sleeping quarters roof too so that there are lights in the sleeping quarters.

Where do the teams come from?

Refer to article 160 Acres. This may sound like I am using people as a commodity - that is not my intension. No one is forced to go anywhere - its completely a volunteer basis. That being said, if you grow your own wheat to make boxes of cereal with or if you grow your own hay to feed your horses and cows in the winter, then you put yourself in a better position. After people go through a training program that can have a job that perhaps few have ever dreamed of performing.

Things we left out

There are other concerns to be fully mobile - a place to shower, some type of living room based quarters so that you could recharge, there needs to be cooking and dining quarters, outfit one with workbenches, cordless drills, table saws, and the works to craft anything needed out of wood, one for metal fabrication and probably a few others as well. You could end up with a lot of trailers. I'm envisioning using the trailer system from 1 to 3 months at a time before moving on to the next location. This would also mean that you would need a home base for the road train. At that home base (the 160 acres) you would need biodiesel made from corn and a tanker truck (imagine traveling the Pan-American highway) to fill all the rigs. Instead of only old trucks and cars from junk yards on the 160 acres, you could train up diesel mechanics and refurbish old semis with new parts to start with. At some point you could build a manufacturing plant and build everything you need from scratch using Cnc machines. As you add each component of the puzzle it can get progressively more complicated - but the gist is this, grow the hay to feed the cows, the cows fertilize the hay and keep the cowboys fed so that you have a complete cycle. I mentioned a road train earlier. That terminology comes from Australia due to hauling multiple trailers (up to 6) and driving over extra rough conditions in some cases. The point being is that semi trucks from Australia (also made to deal with the extreme heat) seem to be of a tougher breed - so that pattern for the trucks (engine wise) should probably follow their example.