– what is the limit to how big a ship can really be?

Question

I recently read an article that the Royal Caribbean have just given the go ahead for the largest ever cruise liner to set sail, it’s nearly 1200ft long and has something ridiculous like 5 water slides and a zoo on it (maybe that’s an exaggeration, but you get the point).

It got me thinking – is there a ceiling to how large a boat can be? Does buoyancy have a limit? If you ignored the impracticality of mooring and getting into smaller bodies of water, is the capacity of Ship building limitless?

In: 2380

Answer 1

An extra note is that while we may be physically able to build larger ships, many ships are built to standards like “Panamax”, in order to use infrastructure like the Panama Canal, Suez Canal, etc.