Free FoundationCertificate
Ship Resistance Fundamentals
What actually slows a ship down in calm water: the five components of resistance, where each one comes from, and which of them you can influence from the bridge.
- Lessons
- 6
- Quiz questions
- 56
- Calculators
- 1 Excel tool included
- Time
- about 52 minutes
- Certificate
- graded final exam, then a PDF certificate with a number anyone can verify. The lessons are free; the exam is part of its specialisation, and opens once every paid course of that sequence is on your account
- Who it's for
- Superintendents, performance analysts, and anyone who reads a noon report and wants to know what the numbers are describing.
- Assumed knowledge
- None. No equations are required to follow it, though a few appear where they earn their place.
Before weather, before fouling, before anything a voyage throws at a vessel, there is a floor: the resistance a hull meets in flat, still water. That floor is not one force but five, and they behave very differently. One of them scales with the cube of speed. One of them barely exists until the ship reaches a certain length-to-speed ratio, then punishes hard. One of them is present on a dead-calm day with no wind at all.
This course walks through all five, in the order they matter, and then goes where the free articles stop: how the towing tank decomposes and scales the components, the form factor, the Kelvin pattern and the bulbous bow's off-design fine print, the appendage bill by configuration, and the drag coefficients that feed sea-trial wind corrections. Each lesson grew from an article we published; the lesson is now the deeper of the two.
By the end you should be able to look at a vessel's speed-power curve and say something specific about which resistance is responsible for the shape of it, and know which component to interrogate when the curve moves.