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!)
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Others have good answers, but in addition… even two ships built with the same hull shape and sail area can have very different top speeds. As you can see on any pier, barnacles eventually cling to just about everything in sea water. They create drag and seriously slow the ship. If a ship was generally only capable of 15 knots max but barnacles have slowed it to 12 kts, that’s a big difference if you’re running from pirates.
Ship builders used various materials to lessen how quickly fouling occurred but all ships eventually had to be taken out on the beach and have their bottom scraped.
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