Recently I was thinking about how in the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie The Black Pearl was claimed to be the fastest ship ever and the HMS Intercepter was the fastest ship in the royal navy, and in one scene The Black Pearl is easily catching up to the Interceptor. I understand that these are fictional vessels, but I still didn’t understand how one could be considerably faster than the other, when I can’t really tell the difference between the two designs(to the untrained eye, you wouldn’t be able to tell which one is faster by looking at it.) How is one ship so much faster than another ship that appears to be designed very similarly?
(Edit: thanks, i have a bit better understanding of what can cause this, thank you to everyone who has commented, although feel free to elaborate or provide additional explanations if you wish!)
In: 65
Just so that it has been said:
Sails do not just get “pushed” by the wind. Sails are airfoils, similar to a vertically mounted airplane wing. When the direction of the wind is moving at an angle across the sail (instead of directly at the face of it), there is also a force generated on the sail perpendicular to the direction of the wind. It is the combination of these two forces which propel a sailing vessel forward.
Manipulating the angle of your boat and/or sails relative to the wind is how a sailing vessel can sail into the wind (although not directly into the wind). Some vessels can even sail faster than the wind speed by carefully combining the two sail forces.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forces_on_sails
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