Ship displacement in kg based on vessel type and length

This is done using formulae in Table 3 of Mayette and Brillant (2026).

Usage

shipMassFromLength(type = NULL, L)

Arguments

type

either (1) a string identifying the ship type, in which case the average overall length of the named vessel is returned, or (2) NULL, in which case a vector of permitted values of type is returned.

L

vessel length in metres.

Value

shipMassFromLength returns ship displacement mass (in kg), according to Mayette and Brillant (2026) Table 3.

Details

The formulae used are as follows.

type	Formula
"Bulk Carrier"	5.64 * L^3.06
"Container Ship"	86.40 * L^2.46
"Cruise"	97.51 * L^2.28
"Ferry"	25.15 * L^2.62
"Fishing"	0.71 * L^3.79
"Government/Research"	2.95 * L^3.22
"Other"	2.64 * L^3.35
"Passenger"	4.32 * L^3.08
"Pleasure Craft"	34.47 * L^2.68
"Sailing"	1.23 * L^3.53
"Tanker"	7.25 * L^3.03
"Tug"	104.48 * L^2.51

References

Mayette, Alexandra, and Sean W. Brillant. "A Regression-Based Method to Estimate Vessel Mass for Use in Whale-Ship Strike Risk Models." PloS One 21, no. 1 (2026): e0339760. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0339760.

See also

Other functions relating to ship characteristics: shipAreaFromMass(), shipLength(), shipWaterForce()

Author

Dan Kelley, with help from Alexandra Mayette

Examples

library(whalestrike)
shipMassFromLength("Tug", 50) / 1e3 # 1920.648
#> [1] 1920.648