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
In terms of the laws of buoyancy, no. Until you hit the volume of the entire ocean, displacement will continue to operate the same.
There’s definitely a point where the physics surrounding our current shipbuilding technology will fail. Bulk carriers already have a problem with breaking in half from the force of the waves if they’re not taken care of properly. There’s a point where something becomes so big that modern materials cannot handle the stresses imposed by moving through the sea.
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