How to stabilize small boat

[Gibson]

How can I stabilize a boat while stationary on a small boat.

[Rigben]

The easy answer is to make it bigger/wider, the potentially more difficult solution is to try and move as much weight as you can lower in the boats hull (or weight blocks on the bottom, but its easy to go overboard and make your boat to heavy).

I personally do the weight blocks last and try to balance first with things like engines/tanks/batteries.

[Gibson]

Originally posted by Rigben:

The easy answer is to make it bigger/wider, the potentially more difficult solution is to try and move as much weight as you can lower in the boats hull (or weight blocks on the bottom, but its easy to go overboard and make your boat to heavy).

I personally do the weight blocks last and try to balance first with things like engines/tanks/batteries.

I've finished shaping the boat and made my engine and I'm almost done and I realized that just walking back and forth on my boat made it tilt like 30°.

[Rigben]

If its really small it will always be sensitive to the weight of the player.

Being that you are basically done and assuming you have height to play with for how it sits in the water try running a line of the weight/mass blocks down the bottom center of the hull. If that helps the stability then its just down to fine-tuning where you want weight.

[Verkfall]

If you really want to, adding fin rudders onto the sides should help at least a little

[Aven]

Pontoons along the edge of a craft are the simplest way to add stability to a small boat. For examples, see inflatable lifeboats, catamarans, and the aptly named pontoon boat.

A more advanced, but not necessarily better, solution would be to use an active deck stabilizer so that, regardless of wave conditions, your deck stays level. A basic example of this can be found in this guide:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1366955561

[McMemes]

Try adding a keel of weight to the bottom of the ship, I know it wont look pretty but it will add a very strong righting force to the ship

[Wingnut]

The only effective way of stabilising a small boat is with active stabilisation and that requires it to be moving (using fins underwater to adjust the trim, pitch and roll).

[Brygun]

1) Active stabilizing with moving like Wingnut says. My workshop has a few different microcontrollers such as using the gyro part or using other sensors to a tunable PID. The gyro is simpler to sue. The PID system allows more fine tuning.

2) When not moving, static stability, the shape of the hull matters. In broad strokes look at a cross section looking forward or aft:
U = lots of displacement but little changes to roll so weak stability
T = heavy stuff in the bottom of the T lowers center of gravity while the wide T is a "life ring" giving a lot of stabilizing affect from roll
V = Between U and V try to keep heavy things low while having a smoother transition for balanced roll
S or Z = flat bottom, middle height sloped like a V then a widening near the water line. Complex shape with a different balance of properties.

3) Technobabble: The location of the center of gravity (CoG) when loaded (such as with fuel) should be below the center of bouyancy. The difference is the meta centric height with more keeping the ship more stable to roll.

4) Online course:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLxHEvq_hK_PzM0HSlNIvSFrmiSgDC2sC1