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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The simplest answer is that some ships are just built to be faster than others. Fast ships have hulls that cut through the water better and tend to be long and narrow, but they can’t hold as much stuff (crew, cargo, cannons, etc.). Also, fast ships tend to have lots of big sails; the bigger the sails, the more wind they can catch to push the ship along. To have lots of sails, you need taller masts, or wider arms, or more masts, or a combination of all three. Weight, drag (how much the shape of the ship pushes against the water), and total sail area all contribute to speed. There are lots of more complicated factors that go into sailing ship speed, but that’s the ELI5 of it.
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