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
Main limits are port depths, dock sizes, and shipyard sizes. And at least with passenger/ cruise ships, they’ve mostly grown taller and wider over the years. Just compare Titanic to Queen Mary II. QMII is less than 200 feet longer than Titanic but about 1.5x as wide and 1.5x as tall (from the keel to the top deck not counting the funnels) iirc. Cruise ships are even bigger than QMII because they’re leisurely cruising around calm(ish) seas wheras QMII and Titanic were designed to get across the North Atlantic quickly, no matter the weather.
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