Ideal Designs for Noah's Ark

cloudyday2

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Just wondering what would be some ideal designs for Noah's Ark if had been real?

Some requirements:
(1) Needs stay as level as possible so the animals aren't injured as the Ark reacts to the waves. Some of the animals could be strapped into place for short periods of extreme waves.
(2) Needs to stay upright and above the surface for access to fresh air.

I wonder if an upside-down dome with lots of ballast might be a good design?

Another thought is a downward-pointing cone? Many ships have a v-shaped hull cross-section and converting that to a circular shape gives a cone.
 
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Bungle_Bear

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Just wondering what would be some ideal designs for Noah's Ark if had been real?

Some requirements:
(1) Needs stay as level as possible so the animals aren't injured as the Ark reacts to the waves. Some of the animals could be strapped into place for short periods of extreme waves.
(2) Needs to stay upright and above the surface for access to fresh air.

I wonder if an upside-down dome with lots of ballast might be a good design?

Another thought is a downward-pointing cone? Many ships have a v-shaped hull cross-section and converting that to a circular shape gives a cone.
You appear to be implying that the design specifications given to Noah by God himself are not "ideal". The specs, per a literal reading of Genesis, state very clearly that the ideal construction is a box.
 
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d taylor

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Rectangular box shape,
close to something like the illustration

oct-fig-1_1.png
 
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cloudyday2

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You appear to be implying that the design specifications given to Noah by God himself are not "ideal". The specs, per a literal reading of Genesis, state very clearly that the ideal construction is a box.
The specifications in Genesis are pretty vague - length, width, and height. That isn't necessarily the brick-shaped design many people claim to have seen on Mt. Ararat.

What is bad about the specification is that the design is not circular when viewed from above. I'm not a ship expert, but it seems that a circle is stronger than an ellipse and a lot stronger than a rectangle.
 
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Bungle_Bear

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The specifications in Genesis are pretty vague - length, width, and height. That isn't necessarily the brick-shaped design many people claim to have seen on Mt. Ararat.

What is bad about the specification is that the design is not circular when viewed from above. I'm not a ship expert, but it seems that a circle is stronger than an ellipse and a lot stronger than a rectangle.
I am not going to tell God he is incompetent..... even though the design is incompetent :D.
 
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Hans Blaster

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Everyone knows the ark was a round boat made of reeds and covered in bitumen. It's right there on the tablet.

Here is a lecture about it:


From the guy who "found" the document and translated it.
 
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cloudyday2

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Another design possibility might be to take a double-hulled catamaran and convert it to circular form. So it would kind of like a giant tire inner-tube with a circular deck on top. I think that might be more stable in the waves, but it would probably be weaker?
 
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cloudyday2

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Here is a lecture about it:


From the guy who "found" the document and translated it.
There was a documentary where they tried to construct a scaled-down replica, but it was pretty leaky because they couldn't recreate a good recipe for the bitumen coating.
 
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Hans Blaster

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Another design possibility might be to take a double-hulled catamaran and convert it to circular form. So it would kind of like a giant tire inner-tube with a circular deck on top. I think that might be more stable in the waves, but it would probably be weaker?

Maybe it was like a double-hulled tanker? Was Noah the antediluvian Captain Hazelwood?
 
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Hans Blaster

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There was a documentary where they tried to construct a scaled-down replica, but it was pretty leaky because they couldn't recreate a good recipe for the bitumen coating.

I think it aired on Nova. I was going to post a image from it, but the lecture was easier to post. (It's a great public lecture. Very entertaining with good storytelling.)
 
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cloudyday2

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Rectangular box shape,
close to something like the illustration

oct-fig-1_1.png
That design is probably easy to construct.

What about cutting that long box into four boxes and forming a square ring? That would still be fairly simple to construct with lots of right angles, but it would probably be more stable and stronger? It could have an X in the middle of the ring possibly for more strength? There might be a flat deck across the top for people and animals to walk around and get fresh air after the rain subsides.
 
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Bungle_Bear

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That design is probably easy to construct.

What about cutting that long box into four boxes and forming a square ring? That would still be fairly simple to construct with lots of right angles, but it would probably more stable and stronger?
Why not use polyethylene or reinforced plastic rather than cypress wood?
 
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Hans Blaster

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He didn't find the tablet, it was given to him. But the important point here is that the biblical ark story is not original.

That's why I said "found". If I recall the story correctly (and it's in the first 10-15 minutes of the talk):

He was working at the British Museum and serving a shift as the "receiving officer" (or what ever the title was), the person who deals with people who enter the museum with an object and ask "is this anything". While doing that duty, someone handed him a nearly intact cuneiform tablet with the story on it. He could have looked for decades in the collections or digs for such an object and someone just walks in and hands it to him. Amazing.

(I watched a whole bunch of OI talks at the beginning of the year. Very fascinating.)
 
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cloudyday2

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Why not use polyethylene or reinforced plastic rather than cypress wood?
I guess we don't know for certain that the Ark was made of wood. The Hebrew word appears only one time ("gofer") and that is translated as "gopher wood", but it could have been made of anything. ( Gopher wood - Wikipedia )
 
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cloudyday2

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That's why I said "found". If I recall the story correctly (and it's in the first 10-15 minutes of the talk):

He was working at the British Museum and serving a shift as the "receiving officer" (or what ever the title was), the person who deals with people who enter the museum with an object and ask "is this anything". While doing that duty, someone handed him a nearly intact cuneiform tablet with the story on it. He could have looked for decades in the collections or digs for such an object and someone just walks in and hands it to him. Amazing.

(I watched a whole bunch of OI talks at the beginning of the year. Very fascinating.)
I thought he worked at the Smithsonian rather than the British Museum, but I might remember wrongly.
 
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