The Hydra

This is my entry to the make it float contest. Before I started designing anything I conducted some research on buoyancy and displacement, with the essential question in mind: "How does buoyancy and displacement affect a boat's ability to carry weight?" The most significant piece of information I found was that “water will push upward against the object with a force equal to the weight of water that is displaced," (Archimedes). With this in mind I then proceeded to calculate the amount of quarters a sphere with a radius of 5 cm could hold. A sphere with a 5 cm radius has a volume of about 523.6 cm^3 and one cm^3 of water being one gram the sphere could hold 523.6 grams which is about 104 quarters, if they all fit and the sphere itself did not weigh much. With all this in mind I set out to design my first prototype.

Hydra 1: had a radius of 2.15 cm which should mean that it could carry a weight of 42 grams, but this design had a number of other problems, such as where the dome an