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
ELI5 – MONEY, ECONOMICS, EFFICIENCY, INFRASTRUCTURE, STABULITY restrict how big they can get.
Not a naval architect but used to work in the merchant navy on container ships.
To my understanding, there’s no real theoretical limit, they can keep getting bigger and bigger on paper. I worked on MV Erving, which was 366m long (~1200ft) and could hold 16000 containers.
Back when it was built it was about getting as much cargo from one place to another as fast as possible. It had a huge engine (2 stroke diesel that created 75000kw of power) cause back in those days that is what the goal was. Now it’s all about economics and saving money. Most high streets still need the demand of things getting from one country to another as fast as possible, but it isn’t money efficient and its better for shipping companies to take a little longer but in the meantime save on fuel. My ships was spending roughly $2.5m every 2 months to refuel.
Money aside, there are other major infrastructures to be majorly aware of, such as the Suez and Panama canal. They save the shipping companies a lot of time and therefore money on fuel, and allow shipping companies to make more money by being able to deliver their cargo and get new things in the shop a lot quicker than going round the capes of South America and South Africa. Ships are often restricted to the dimensions of these canals and ships are even named after this such as PANAMX containers, meaning the maximum size of a ship to fit through the Panama canal.
Another issue with making bigger ships that a lot of people aren’t aware of is the depth of water around ports. The ship I worked on was so big that we were restricted into what ports we could enter due to fear of grounding so if ships were made bigger, they would have a greater draft and therefor would run higher risks.
While larger ships can potentially carry more cargo or passengers, there are limits to the efficiency gains. Beyond a certain size, the economies of scale may diminish, and other factors such as loading and unloading times, port infrastructure, and operational complexity may offset the benefits of increased size.
Lastly is overall stability, even the ship I was on, when it was fully loaded, and we had some bad weather, it would roll like crazy. Like most things made from metal, they are designed so that they bend and flex. I imagine there comes a limit to this, longer something is, the more it can bend/flex but yeah, within limits for it to still remain safe.
Unfortunately I don’t know much about cruise ships, personally I think they are unnecessary and would advise people to read up on how much they pollute, but yeah hopefully that helps give a bit of insight for you!
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