Paid FoundationCertificate

Ship Resistance Fundamentals

What actually slows a ship down in calm water: the five components of resistance, where each one comes from, and which of them you can influence from the bridge.

Lessons
6
Quiz questions
56
Calculators
1
Time
About 52 min
Price
€149+ VAT
Certificate
Graded final exam, then a PDF certificate with a number anyone can verify
Who it's for
Superintendents, performance analysts, and anyone who reads a noon report and wants to know what the numbers are describing.
Assumed knowledge
None. No equations are required to follow it, though a few appear where they earn their place.
Taught by

Christos Papandreou

CEO & Founder, Blue Autonomy

  • Naval architect and marine engineer, National Technical University of Athens
  • 15 years of experience in fleet performance and operational data
  • Chief Scientist, NEMO — previously DeepSea Technologies, StormGeo, Athenian Sea Carriers, PwC

What you will be able to do

By the end of the course. Each outcome names the lessons that deliver it, and the final exam samples every one of them.

  1. Name the five components of calm-water resistance, state roughly what share of the total each takes for a slow full-form ship versus a fast fine-form one, and distinguish the components design fixed from those operations can still influence. Lessons 1, 3, 4
  2. Explain how frictional resistance arises in the boundary layer, what the ITTC-57 correlation line estimates and why the towing tank needs it, and why hull roughness drifting past roughly 200 µm AHR turns into measurable fuel. Lesson 2
  3. Explain why pressure never fully recovers at a viscous stern, what the form factor (1+k) expresses, and why flow separation from an abrupt aft body costs twice — added drag plus a spoiled wake field at the propeller. Lesson 3
  4. Interpret where a ship sits on its wave-making curve from the Froude number, including the humps and hollows of bow–stern wave interference and the off-design fine print of a bulbous bow. Lesson 4
  5. Identify the appendage and steering items on a hull's drag bill — bilge keels, shafts and brackets, thruster tunnels, and the standing rudder angle a single-screw ship carries even on a straight course — and explain why alignment to local flow decides what each costs. Lesson 5
  6. Explain why a ship meets an apparent headwind of its own making on a windless day, what frontal area does to the size of that penalty, and how wind-tunnel drag-coefficient sets feed sea-trial wind corrections. Lesson 6

Before weather, before fouling, before anything a voyage throws at a vessel, there is a floor: the resistance a hull meets in flat, still water. That floor is not one force but five, and they behave very differently. One of them grows with the square of speed, so the power to overcome it grows with the cube. One of them barely exists until the ship reaches a certain speed-to-length ratio, then punishes hard. One of them is present on a dead-calm day with no wind at all.

This course walks through all five, in the order they matter, and then goes where the free articles stop: how the towing tank decomposes and scales the components, the form factor, the Kelvin pattern and the bulbous bow's off-design fine print, the appendage bill by configuration, and the drag coefficients that feed sea-trial wind corrections. Each lesson grew from an article we published; the lesson is now the deeper of the two.

The opening lesson is free to read as a sample. By the end you should be able to look at a vessel's speed-power curve and say something specific about which resistance is responsible for the shape of it, and know which component to interrogate when the curve moves.

What the course covers

  1. The Five Components of Calm-Water Resistance 7 min
  2. Frictional Resistance: The Dominant Component 10 min
  3. Viscous Pressure (Form) Resistance 9 min
  4. Wave-Making Resistance 11 min
  5. Drag from Appendages and Steering 8 min
  6. Air Resistance: The Headwind You Can't Escape 7 min

€149 + VAT

€184.76 including 24% VAT in Greece. Prices are shown before VAT because VAT depends on where you are: checkout shows the total before you pay, and a company in the EU that enters its VAT number pays the net price.

Paid once, for one person, with no expiry: every lesson, the workbooks, the final examination and the certificate.

Online checkout opens with the launch in October 2026. Until then, write to info@blueautonomy.gr and we arrange access.

All prices · Refunds: 14 days, unless you have started

Common questions

What exactly is included?

6 lessons (about 52 minutes in total), 56 quiz questions with explained answers, and 1 working Excel calculator: Hull-roughness penalty calculator.

How much does it cost?

€149 plus VAT, paid once: €184.76 with 24% VAT in Greece, or the VAT of your own country, applied at checkout. That buys every lesson, the workbooks, the final examination and the certificate, for one person, with no expiry. Everything else is on the pricing page.

Do I get a certificate?

Yes. The course ends with a graded final exam, marked on our server rather than in your browser: you see your score and which questions you got wrong, but not the answers, because the questions are drawn from a pool. Pass it and you get a PDF certificate in your name, with a certificate number on it.

That number is the point. Anyone you show the certificate to can check it themselves at academy.blueautonomy.gr/verify, with no account and no email to us: the page states the name, the course and the date we issued it. A certificate nobody can verify is a decorated PDF, and we would rather issue one that stands up.

Can I preview the course?

Yes: the first lesson, The Five Components of Calm-Water Resistance, is free to read in full. It is a real lesson, not a trailer: same depth, same quiz.

Do I need prior knowledge?

None. No equations are required to follow it, though a few appear where they earn their place.