Eli5 Why the biggest boats are so much bigger than the biggest land vehicles.

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I was thinking maybe because the ocean is a lot flatter than a lot of terrain but there’s also large waves and storms and sea. I also can’t imagine that something like an aircraft carrier would be significantly less complicated or difficult to build than an equally sized land vehicle.

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Anonymous 0 Comments

The maximum size of vehicles is decided by the other things they have to interact with to do the jobs they have to do.

Max boat sizes will be decided by the docks they have to visit, or the harbor depths they need to come into. That can be pretty big.

The job a boat does is to move a bunch of stuff from one place to one other place.

Max truck sizes might be decided by the height of bridges they need to go under.

The job of trucks is to move just a few things to a whole range of different places.

Then there are trains. Cubic storage of a train might be comparable to a big ocean vehicle, but the length of a train is going to have to at LEAST be small enough to fit between one place and the next, right? And the width of the train is very much decided by the tracks it runs on.

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