How are boats that are incredibly heavy able to float on water and sail across ocean? I mean, the cruise ships these days are MASSIVE!! 🛳️
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Luckily, displaced water increases with volume at the same rate does weight.
This means that you can escalate a ship infinitely and it will always float. And will always float with a big part of it above water.
A friendly factor is that floatation force is spread under the entire ship, meaning that it’s structurally easy to make it work. Conversely, aircraft and road vehicles do rest their weight in few small spots and that complicates the scaling up a lot more.
The big factor in limiting ship size is handling and water channels like Panama or Suez.
Handling is a big issue because propulsion and steering do scale up square to dimension, while mass does scale cube to dimension. This means that the bigger you get the more awful handling becomes. Up to needing miles to slow down few knots, and steering few degrees per minute maximum becomes a reality.
Last issue are waves. You risk the ship snapping in two if the ship is very long and travels above a very long wave. This can be countered structurally, but it costs more the bigger you get.
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