Noah's Ark (!) Shows How Seaworthy It Is In A Storm

[SteelCurtain]

 Correct a scaled replica floated in a large tank that had waves produced to represent the conditions that were suspected to be during the flood.  just as engineers do with modern day vessels before they build them, see Christians do use science and use it well.

GC

Models can scale things like buoyancy and fluid dynamics.

A scale model, for pretty obvious reasons, cannot replicate torsional stresses to scale, or, specific to a hull, lateral and longitudinal keel stresses to scale. This is stuff they teach you like day one when modeling in wind tunnels and wave pools. The square-cube law is important here; if you increase an object's size, its surface area increases by a power of two, and its weight increases by a power of three. The structural rigidity, however, increases at a slower rate than the weight. This is important. The bigger something gets, the more fragile it is. Think of the Titanic. Ass in the air, that structural steel snapped like a twig.

So they could tell that it might have floated, and that with a representative cargo load it might not capsize. But they cannot tell you just in a wave pool alone what happens when a wave hits at an angle so that there is a massive torsional stress across the keel. For that, you need computer models. This is what real ships have to go through. A gopherwood ship, 450ft long, would not survive a wave that hit it at an angle. Other wooden ships give empirical evidence that this is so. The Wyoming foundered in the first major storm it got stuck in, and before that needed modern pumps to keep afloat because of how much water came in when the planks stretched and warped because of the length.