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
The only limit would be the physical resistance of materials. But if you manage to build something like a very large plate, for instance, with high borders, you can make it an insanely large ship. You merely have to get materials which will resist the huge torsion forces from having parts dangling, while other are pushed by waves, the parts in question changing with the underlying waves.
So, the current sizes are determined both by the sizes of the bodies of water / harbors (because, if you need 150m underwater and 800m abreast to be able to navigate, it *might* cause a few problems to reach a harbor, or to use channels, etc.), and by the economical use. If you plan to take 10k passengers, a ship maybe 20 or 30% larger than what we currently have will be enough. If you want to take 250k passengers, you’ll build larger.
Same for cargo: If you need to take 100 times the number of “boxes” a very big container transport does today, then yep, maybe you’ll build larger. But, then again, you’ll need facilities which can accommodate such a giant ship. And unless several ports invest in order to be able to do so, you won’t be able to use your ship, in practice. Considering the cost of a ship, you don’t want to build a giant you cannot use.
So, the limits are more because of economical and practical constraints, than physical ones.
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