A friend and I have been having an ongoing debate for years. We were at a pub on a wharf, watching shipping container ships and cruise ships come into dock, and he posed the question. With no wind, no waves, perfect conditions, could he move the ship at all?
In: Planetary Science
Theoretically yes if you kept at it hard enough. Unlike moving something on land, you’re in luck in that something in fluid doesn’t have a static friction to overcome. If there was even the tiniest coefficient of static friction, you’d never be able to move it.
Also luckily, hydrodynamic drag goes with velocity, and you’re starting at 0 so drag is 0. Anything even moderately above zero will be more drag than any force you could apply. But you only said to move it, so almost no velocity, so almost no drag.
So you’re mainly dealing with f=ma.
Remember that Ford Lightning doing that huge feat pulling the million+ pounds of train cars? Between the low static friction and extremely low rolling resistance of steel wheels on steel rails, it didn’t really take much force to move it. A visual clue is that they used a standard tow strap to do it, nothing special. Really most decent electric cars could do this, and so could any gas or diesel if it had the right gearing.
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