Yeh totally , its just bit of a shame we are in the position of our politicians needing strict rules to guide their morals but we are now trusting them to leave an organisation which set up a lot of strict rules like this and rewrite the rules . <| sep |> Highly appreciated . Thank you so much for the helpful advice and pointers and warm welcome if I may say so ! <| sep |> When we talk about ship stability , what we are most often referring to is how much restoring moment due to hydrostatic forces is present for a given angle of loll . For small angles of inclination , this moment is directly proportional to a quantity known as the metacentric height , often abbreviated GM . The metacenter itself can be thought of as a point in space from which the hull ' s center of buoyancy B hangs like a pendulum . The ship rolling back and forth through this small amplitude regime is then thought of as the center of buoyancy swinging in a circular arc . GM is the vertical distance between the metacenter M and the ship ' s center of gravity G . It turns out that the position of M can be calculated using just the ship ' s waterplane geometry and displacement volume . The distance BM is equal to the second moment of area of the waterplane about the long axis note that this also works for pitching type rotations by using the second moment about the athwartships axis instead divided by the displacement volume . The second moment is proportional to the cube of the beam , and the displacement volume is proportional to the beam . Letting K represent a point on the keel at the centerline , GM BM KB KG , showing that GM is roughly proportional to the square of the beam .