G'day all,
Ships
Modern ships do sink, rarely. The last really big ship to sink had a problem with its forward hatches. They were secured with bolts that could not withstand 36 hours of hurricane conditions and 12 hatches blew because the ship had been inside a hurricane for five days. The hatches were actually quite small, only a couple of metres long. The ship sunk.
So you certainly do not need wave length conditions. Not being a marine architect or expert in just how these things are built, I'm pretty sure these very big ships have been built with wave lengths in mind. Actually even in the biggest seas, I've seen these ships just sitting in the water. They don't ride over the waves the way a smaller ship does. Really huge waves just pass down their sides like a model in a rippling pond. It really is strange to watch, especially if you are on a warship that is going through about 40 degree movement in three axis at the time.
I would suggest the risk is more likely that in a huge storm that containers could get swept overboard. Now this is something that happens all the time. I insure my cargo and it costs about 0.001% of the value of the cargo while on the sea, so the risks are pretty small. I was curious and asked what the biggest risk was, thinking theft in the ports. I was told being swept overboard was the largest risk by a very large factor but still a tiny risk per container (and I only import a few containers a year).
I know oil tankers that are really huge have a system where the ship actually is quite flexible. It is very disimilar to the ships in WWII extremely vulnerable to a shock wave at the keel. I'd think that they would sink if torpeodoed too but more because modern torpedoes work quite differently to the WWII ones. They actually don't even impact with the ship and a really big ship like this would be hit with a wide spread of topedoes set to go off almost simultaneously at various points.
Regards
Richard
