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You are talking about the boot topping, the area around the waterline. It's part of the hull, but generally you wouldn't call a ship with a red boot topping a "red-hulled ship".
Underwater it will all likely be gray, as the paint is self-polishing/ablative and the color wears off as the paint wears away.
That said it is an interesting question - to be totally honest I never really looked at the boot topping of Carnival ships that closely.
quote:Originally posted by Ðraikar:how would you fix the red boot topping on cruise liners ??? I know you have your own "home made" paint that dose not wear away.
The boot topping does not wear away... It's the paint UNDER the waterline that does.
The wearing away is intentional - if the paint wears away you do not get lots of paint buildup on the bottom.
Having been around boats (not the size of FANTASY-class ships for sure ) for my whole life we certainly didn't use self-polishing paint - it was like any other paint; new antifouling had to be applied each year and this would, after a while, create buildup on the hull. Eventually you would have to have the hull blasted and start over, etc.
Most non-self polishing paints have been taken off the market now. Many of the last ones bit the dust this year as on 1 January new IMO regulations took effect banning certain biocides called TBTs which until recently were contained in almost all marine antifoulings. As the remaining formulas with TBTs were replaced with new, the replacement is most often an SPC.
On subsequent pages are some photos of ships several years after application. You can see that most of the color has faded away to gray beneath the waterline as the SPC is washed away. (There is a lot of techno-babble there too, but that can be ignored for the purposes of this discussion as it's basically just trying to convince you that SPCs work well.)
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