let's build a ship

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Rupert

My suggestion of taking the ratio of flotation/weight and multiplying it by draught to get total hull height gives a height of 115 inches, and thus a freeboard of 71 inches, just under six feet.

With a height of about 9.5 feet and an effective volume of 4915 feet if the ship is treated as a simple block this gives a top surface of ~513 square feet, and with a beam/length ratio of 1:5 a beam of just over 10 feet and a length of ~50.6 feet.

Overall the ship's probably a little wider with that being the waterline beam, and a little longer due to not being a simple block.

And yes, this gives a deck area larger than that which the surface area and armour rules do - the latter assume each face of the vehicle is 1/6th of its area, which only applies to cubes, spheres, and a few other shapes and this ship is not one of them.

I agree with your calculation's results. I thought about doing it that way, but I had doubts about whether the linear approximation was sufficiently consistent with the formula for draft. If draft is figured as the cube root of weight, then it seems as if there ought to be a cube root in the computation of total height as well, and the difference of the two ought to yield freeboard.

I certainly agree about the deck area being a function of length and beam.