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
I’m not a physicist, but this post just brought back a question someone asked our physics teacher when I was at school. We were discussing the (then) largest ship that had ever been built, think it was the QE2 or something, and someone asked if it was long enough would it snap in two because of the curve of the earth?
If I remember right his answer was that the ship would have to be heavier as you get towards the middle so that the buoyancy line (I’ve just discovered it’s known as the plimsole line) would be deeper there and allow either end of the ship to still touch the water. Buoyancy isn’t affected by depth so as long as the entire length of the ship is supported by water then there is theoretically no limit to the length a ship can be.
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