Rasing and lowering the waterline?

[Bluishdoor76]

Heres a question I've had for a while, will we ever be able to adjust how low or high the ship's waterline sits? Sometimes when I make a ship I feel like there's too much hull showing and wished I could lower the hull a bit more into the water. What does anyone else think, would it be a good or bad thing?

[Shaftoe]

I totally agree! Sometimes ships literally jump out of water, and waterline is very often waaay above the sea level! It looks very unnatural and definitely has to be fixed. 

[Marshall99]

Totally agree! I want to design low freeboard battleships for coastal defense.

[Dirlinger]

As long the effects on the various effects such as ship buoyancy, internal volume,  weather (high waves making use of certain weapons unusable)etc, etc are respected.

I am just reading "Warrior to Dreadnought: Warship design and development" by David Brown and how much thought they gave in the period to design of a warship. Freeboard was not something left to chance and if final design ended up being off, either way, there was lot of additional work being spent on how this would affect the ship.

[Tycondero]

I agree as well. Maybe the downside could be that you get more compartments that are at risk getting flooded if penetrated?

[Admiral Bornlower]

There is another reason to add mechanics for the waterline.  If you get flooding damage from a low shell penetration or even hit by a torpedo while in a sharp turn, reversing your turn would bring the hull breach above the waterline if your ship turns sharply enough to list far enough. This is taken from real WWII encounters. It would be useless on a BB but on a cruiser it might give them time to fix the leak