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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It is as simple as the fact that you don’t need to build roads on the water.
To build a land based vehicle, it needs to be able to fit the infrastructure of the land – roads and bridges for example are designed to be a certain width, and strong enough to support a certain weight of vehicle. Countries will then place limits on the size of the vehicles they allow to use their roads so that they are appropriate for the infrastructure built – a standard truck will fit on the road and won’t over load a bridge and cause it to collapse by driving over it.
If you want to make a bigger vehicle? You now need to replace every road with a wider and stronger one able to support it, much to the annoyance of everyone that lived alongside the previous road whose homes and businesses are now being demolished to widen the road.
On the water, this doesn’t really matter – the oceans and seas don’t need any preparation or infrastructure to allow a bigger boat to travel over them. As long as your boat is able to float safely and deal with things like storms and waves safely then you are good to go.
The biggest issue with larger boats is the infrastructure in ports which needs to be able to berth and load/unload them. The trick is that you only need to build a port at the very beginning and end of the journey, so the cost and practicality of this is far more reasonable than on land where you would also have to upgrade every meter of roads between those two points as well.
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