Function
The bow is designed to reduce the resistance of the hull cutting through water and should be tall enough to prevent water from easily washing over the top of it. On slower ships like tankers, a fuller bow shape is used to maximise the volume of the ship for a given length.
A "wet bow" results from seawater washing over the top of the hull. A raked stem can help to reduce the wetness of the bow. Aside from making the deck slippery, water can corrode the metal of the ship. If the temperature is low enough this water can also freeze on the deck, rails, turrets, and other exposed surfaces, increasing the topside weight.
Read more about this topic: Bow (ship)
Famous quotes containing the word function:
“The mother’s and father’s attitudes toward the child correspond to the child’s own needs.... Mother has the function of making him secure in life, father has the function of teaching him, guiding him to cope with those problems with which the particular society the child has been born into confronts him.”
—Erich Fromm (1900–1980)
“The intension of a proposition comprises whatever the proposition entails: and it includes nothing else.... The connotation or intension of a function comprises all that attribution of this predicate to anything entails as also predicable to that thing.”
—Clarence Lewis (1883–1964)