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.
You have to take other factors into consideration as well, such as the free surface effect, the draft, the risk of wear and tear on the spots that sustain the most stress, so on and so forth. You can google the largest vessel and see just how big they are. The last couple of ports I’ve been in, the limiting factor of who can enter the zone is draft. More than a few boats had to wait for high tide before they berth because they would run aground otherwise
I’m not a physicist, but this post just brought back a question someone asked our physics teacher when I was at school. We were discussing the (then) largest ship that had ever been built, think it was the QE2 or something, and someone asked if it was long enough would it snap in two because of the curve of the earth?
If I remember right his answer was that the ship would have to be heavier as you get towards the middle so that the buoyancy line (I’ve just discovered it’s known as the plimsole line) would be deeper there and allow either end of the ship to still touch the water. Buoyancy isn’t affected by depth so as long as the entire length of the ship is supported by water then there is theoretically no limit to the length a ship can be.
An extra note is that while we may be physically able to build larger ships, many ships are built to standards like “Panamax”, in order to use infrastructure like the Panama Canal, Suez Canal, etc.
Us navy veteran here. I suspect the practical limiting factor would be not the ship itself but port facilities. Ships need to tie up pier side and on Occasion get serviced. If there is a big enough space that’s a problem.
Oh. Also insurance. Ships must have insurance. For a mega gigantic ship the insurance rates might be prohibitive.
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