How do large ships survive being tossed and heaved by waves on a rough open sea without breaking apart?
In: Engineering
They are designed to resist the stresses.
Although, as with everything in nature, there is no upper limit on what those stresses can be, so there are cases when ships break apart but it doesn’t happen very often.
During WWII the US created a class of cargo ships that could be built very quickly, the [Liberty ships](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_ship). They were rather flimsy in design, the idea was that the US industry could build them faster than the German subs could sink them. There were a few cases when Liberty ships broke in half and sank during storms, but that was an exception rather than the rule.
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