Nautical, Ships

A ship is a large watercraft capable of offshore navigation. Ships may be operated by: more...

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Transportation

Governments (military, rescue, research, transportation); Private companies and institutions (transportation, offshore resources, research); Individuals (large yachts, research).;

Nomenclature

A ship usually has enough size to carry its own boats, such as lifeboats, dinghies, or runabouts. A rule of thumb used is "a boat can fit on a ship, but a ship can't fit on a boat". Consequently submarines are referred to as "boats", because early submarines were small enough to be carried aboard a ship in transit to distant waters. Other types of large vessels which are traditionally called boats are the Great Lakes freighter, the riverboat, and the ferryboat. Though large enough to carry their own boats and/or heavy cargoes, these examples are designed for operation on inland or protected coastal waters. Often local law and regulation will define the exact size (or the number of masts) which a boat requires to become a ship. Nautical means related to sailors, particularly customs and practices at sea. Naval is the adjective pertaining to ships, though in common usage it has come to be more particularly associated with the noun "navy".

Measuring ships

One can measure ships in terms of overall length, length of the waterline, beam (breadth), depth (distance between the crown of the weather deck and the top of the keelson), draft (distance between the highest waterline and the bottom of the ship) and tonnage. A number of different tonnage definitions exist and are used when describing merchant ships for the purpose of tolls, taxation, etc.

In Britain until the Samuel Plimsoll Merchant Shipping Act of 1876, ship-owners could load their vessels until their decks were almost awash, resulting in a dangerously unstable condition. Additionally, anyone who signed onto such a ship for a voyage and, upon realizing the danger, chose to leave the ship, could end up in jail.

Samuel Plimsoll, a member of Parliament, realised the problem and engaged some engineers to derive a fairly simple formula to determine the position of a line on the side of any specific ship's hull which, when it reached the surface of the water during loading of cargo, meant the ship had reached its maximum safe loading level. To this day, that mark, called the "Plimsoll Mark", exists on ships' sides, and consists of a circle with a horizontal line through the centre. On the Great Lakes of North America the circle is replaced with a diamond. Because different types of water, (summer, fresh, tropical fresh, winter north Atlantic) have different densities, subsequent regulations required painting a group of lines forward of the Plimsoll mark to indicate the safe depth (or freeboard above the surface) to which a specific ship could load in water of various densities. Hence the "ladder" of lines seen forward of the Plimsoll mark to this day. This is called the "freeboard mark" or "load line mark"in the marine industry.

Read more at Wikipedia.org