Tugboats Pulling Ship

The model shows a ship pulled by two small towboats. Towboats are moving in slightly different direction as the ship. When two (or more) **forces** are **acting** on a body, they **add together** to produce a **resultant effect**. This is represented by a **resultant force**. If the resultant force is non-zero, the forces are said to be unbalanced and will produce a noticeable effect on the object.



**Direction** of the **resultant force** depends on the **direction** of forces which they make a final effect. Forces are **vectors**. There is a variety of methods for determining the **magnitude** and **direction** of the result of adding two or more vectors. Adding two vectors can be graphically visualized like two successive arrows, with the **vector sum** being the **vector distance** from the beginning to the end point.



Representing the vectors by arrows drawn to scale, the beginning of **vector 2** is placed at the end of **vector 1**. The **vector sum (F)** can be drawn as the vector from the beginning to the end point. The **resultant force** can be also found by constructing a **parallelogram** with the initial force vectors forming two adjacent sides. The diagonal of the parallelogram gives the **resultant force vector**.