My Blog for Physics in Film

The three scenes I chose are when the captain falls off the ship, when the cruise ship hits a small sailboat, and the dock collision scene.

For the first scene, I am trying to see how high the deck is from which the captain fell. The quantities I need are the time it takes for him to fall and his acceleration. He fell for about 5 seconds and his acceleration is 9.81 m/s^2­, which is that due to gravity.

In the second scene, I want to know how much momentum the cruise ship lost when it hit the small sailboat (which subsequently exploded). I will need to know the speed and mass of the cruise ship and the mass of the small sailboat. The cruise ship was going around 20 knots at this time, and since one knot is equal to about .514 m/s, the ship was going about 10.28 m/s. An approximate mass of the ship was hard to obtain as most of the data for ships care mostly for the capacity. Anyway, I found that on one site that the weight of the Carnival Destiny is 51000 tons which converts to 4.62E7 kg. For the small sailboat, I looked around the internet for similar boats and estimate the boat is about 10000 pounds, which would be 4,536 kg.

The third scene requires the mass of the boat, the time, and the length of the dock. The mass of the boat is already done. The time was about 3 or 4 minutes but I will stick with 3 minutes, which would be 180 s. Lastly is the length of the dock. After the boat came to a stop, it was completely in the dock, which means the length of the boat is approximately the length of the dock. According the Wikipedia, the ship that was featured in speed was 135 m long, so that must be the length of the dock.

PS: I meant to put that I wanted to see if the dock used would be sufficient to stop the boat. for what it is worth.