[Christ]

Originally Posted by RobertSmalls

The kind of "floating" I'm talking about here is not buoyancy, it's a result of surface tension. No metals float buoyantly in water, but it's easy to get a paper clip to sit on the surface of water, and it's possible to get a dime to do the same. However, make the dime or the paper clip 10 times as long, 10 times as wide, and 10 times as thick, and its behavior will change.

The point is scale models do not behave the same as full-sized objects, because area and surface forces scale with L^2, while body forces scale with L^3.

Gotcha. I wasn't clear on exactly what point you were making, and I obviously took the wrong part of the post.