How long for a ship to cruise 1700 miles?

Answer 1

That depends on the ship's speed. Speed is mainly dictated by size of the vessel, weather, and fuel economy concerns.

We can give you some typical speeds of typical vessels. Divide 1700 nautical miles by the average speed to get the average trip time. If you're referring to statute miles, convert to nautical miles first.

Reefer ship (fresh fruits/vegetables) @ 20-28 knots = 61-85 hours

Container ships @ 23 knots = 74 hours

Passenger @ 20 knots = 85 hours

Bulk cargo or tanker @ 10-12 knots = 142-170 hours

Militaries generally don't disclose the top speeds of their vessels but you can do a pretty good job estimating if you know the length of the ship at the waterline.

There are engineering methods that can result in some improvements but as a general rule, the maximum speed of a displacement vessel is 1.34 times the square root of the waterline length. Due to the physics of displaced fluids, the amount of energy required to go faster than that spikes exponentially.

Now that we have an idea of the maximum speed, we need to consider desirable speed.

Fuel economy generally increases considerably as you slow the ship down. Even a decrease of 1-2 knots can have a massive impact on fuel consumption. Cargo ships will go only as fast as their schedule dictates. They don't make any more money by getting there early.

Passenger ships make more money by increasing turnover. They typically strive to travel at night and arrive at each destination in the morning before the passengers finish breakfast. They'll burn more fuel to get there by morning. Paying passengers are also more sensitive to comfort issues than shipping containers so passenger ships may be forced to decrease speed due to weather earlier than a cargo ship would. They will subsequently have to increase their speed above average to make port on schedule. As a result, passenger ships can have higher variation in speed.