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 largest cruise ships are still only at about 362 meters, compared to the, by now, standard for megamax container vessels of 400 meters… So yes, they can get bigger, but you also need to make sure you have a business for that many people
Many places are starting to limit the size of calling cruise ships, ie the Galapagos only allow ships with 100 or less passengers if I remember correctly
For container vessels it would probably be something like the Suez canal that limits it, but I think the next advance in that field will be one or two more rows. Currently they are at 24 rows, dubbed megamax-24. I have heard a rumor that a gigamax-25 has been pre approved by a classification society. The largest cranes can theoretically take 27 rows
For tankers (and dry bulk) it would probably be the depth somewhere that limits them. But as the biggest usually are build for a very specific trade you can get around a lot of the most notorious limitations if you want ie Malaga Strait
It would for most not be the buoyancy that is the limit, but the stress factors (Share Force, Bending Moment and Torsion) and keeping a legal, positive GM (distance from center of Gravity to Metacenter height, a number for the ability to upright itself) for the cruiseship and the empty tankers
Hope this answered a few things
Source: second officer on a merchant vessel
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