Displacement and buyancy?

[Postertag]

Hello, how do I make my ship's waterline be at the expected waterline? I have designed a small 50-meter-long, roughly 1500 displacement gunboat, yet it stands way above than expected. Mind tell me what am I doing wrong?

[Shipwrecked]

While I've never tried to get exact numbers, I do know that if your ship is way too buoyant, make the hull's armor thicker, or add some ballast blocks to the ship, say one on both ends for example.

[Metal Izanagi]

Give it thicker armor!

[Sexy Jeff Goldblum]

You propably build it to be closer to 2000-3000 ton by mistake, you can just try to reduce the height of the lowest part of the hull to reduce the total buyancy and/or add armor to a part underwater along the center of gravity. A good thing to do in the future is to build your hull and add more and more weight to figure out what displacement your design can take at the waterline. So that you can adjust its shape and size before adding everything else.