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Originally Posted by malloyd
This is absolutely false. Virtually everything transported is *less* dense than water, simply because most freight moves by ship and if you load a ship so it is more dense than water, it *sinks*.
You normally assume general freight is between 25 and 50 lbs/cf (0.4 to 0.8 times the density of water). Though if you are designing a ship to carry ore or liquified natural gas you may be outside that range, and you should check your design for stability for the 0-25 range, since the buyer may someday want to move it with empty holds and will probably sue you if you didn't mention he needed to add ballast before doing that.
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For centuries the rule of thumb has been that a ton of general cargo takes up about 100 cubic feet, to the point that 'tons' when referring to merchant ships for a very long time mean 'useful cargo hold volume in 100 cubic foot units'. Water has a density about three times this.
Quote:
Originally Posted by scc
LOL, no. The average density of the entire ships must be less then water, but ships will have plenty of dead space and crew quarters to offset dense containers, and containers will also have dead space inside them. Consider a car, over all it's density might be less then water, but for any given part (Something that your far more likely to want to put inside a Hideaway) the density is going to be grater then water.
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Aside from dense bulk cargo (ore, grain), cargoes are almost never denser than water. Even a full standard container has a maximum weight that puts them slightly
under the density of water (and as they're fairly watertight, they float just at the surface and lost containers are quite a hazard for smaller ships and boats). Tanks are denser than water, cars and trucks are not (until they fill with water, but that's not relevant to storing them in a Hideaway).