Del Fondo del Océano
al Borde del Espacio

Almost nobody really looks at a ship. We see one — in the harbour, from the beach, in the background of a film — and move on, because there seems to be nothing to look at: a ship is ship-shaped. And yet every one of its lines is there for a reason, and none of them is decorative. The bulb at the bow of a freighter, the V-shaped bottom of a fast boat, the ton and a half of lead hanging under a cruising yacht, the absurdly short wings of a Soviet machine that refused to climb: all of those are answers. The problem is that the question is invisible.

This book comes from a simple idea: that the physics behind vehicles moving through a fluid belongs to no one in particular. You do not need an engineering degree to understand why a submarine is a cylinder. You need someone to explain it without hiding behind the equations. There are four or five formulas in the whole book, none of them to memorise — they are there so you can see where a number comes from, not so you can solve it.

To explain how vehicles are shaped, the book makes a vertical journey. It starts on the ocean floor, where pressure crushes, and climbs: the surface of the sea, the boundary between water and air, ordinary flight, the speed at which air stops being docile, and finally the way out of the atmosphere. At every altitude the fluid changes, the speed changes and the machines change. What does not change are the three or four laws that force them into the shape they have. Recognising those is the whole trick.

Jorge López Alonso is a freelance naval and ocean engineer based in Málaga, Spain (colegiado n.º 3524). He works on yacht design, hydrofoil development and CFD analysis for high-performance vessels — the same physics the book describes, applied every day to real hulls and real foils.

He has spent a long time studying how vehicles behave inside a fluid. This book is an attempt to hand that over to anyone curious enough to ask why things are shaped the way they are.