In order to account for an immense amount of technological and cultural disparity, I have been attempting to figure out ways that the world in a setting could be extremely hostile to travel. The idea I came up with was to have a planet that is majority-water with two moons that have extreme effects on the tides of the world, thus making sea travel (and even coastal living) an arduous task.
Not for twin moons, but desired effect OP is requestng:
If the only goal is making ocean travel and coastal regions scary, consider just a medium-small moon that is very close in. Just barely outside the Roche limit of the planet.
If your planet is like Earth, and your moon is like our moon, and it is only 21000 km away.
(Extreme case! Note this is center to center distance. Surface to surface would be a mere 12000km!!)
Your tides will be short, sharp and very very high.
And you will encounter 2 very high, 4 very low and 2 moderately high tides each day.
The high-hightide occurs when the moon is above you, thus only 14500km away from your surface to its center of mass.
The low-hightide occurs at the other side of the planet, when the moon is 27500km from your surface to its center of mass, thus has apparently 2/7ths of the gravity pull on your ocean.
The tides will be ridonculously high. The high-hightide will be about 145m in deep ocean, up to 1km high in coastal areas.
The tides will try to change quicker than the maximum wave movement rate in ocean, so it will not form a wave but a series of breakers trying desperately to keep up.
(Think the wave in the movie Interstellar, just not as neat)
Consider using a slightly smaller moon!
For optimum results: position you moon so the tides move around the planet at the exact same speed as deep-ocean waves. About 760km/h for Earth. This requires the moon to rise every 52 hours. This requires a prograde orbit every 76 hours. (producing a moon that rises in the West once every 52 hours).
Needed orbital distance for this: 91458km
Tides will only be 17.6 times as high as we currently experience: about 7m in deep ocean and 50m on the coastlines.
BUT
The tide will manifest as two tsunami's circling the Earth continuously. A 7m smooth wave in deep ocean.
Whenever the tsunami reaches continental shelf, with water depth less than about 250m, it will not be a neat wave but a foaming breaker 50m high.
And about 1 hour in duration.
Say about 3x the flooding depth and 12x the volume of water of the 2011 Sendai Earthquake's tsunami.
Hitting every single west coast on Earth.
Twice each day.
Forever.
Tides are predictable.
The thing about predictable hazards is that they are less hazardous. If you know it is dangerously cold you can prepare for the cold. If you know there a fierce beasts you can come armed and in strength.
Tides are eminently predictable and seafarers have been using knowledge of tides for millenia. Super high tides would not make it more difficult to live on the coast because you would live above high tide, as people do. Super low tide would not make it hard to sail around because your boats would sit on the bottom and you would sit in the bar until the tide came in.
Until they aren't...
I am thinking of 2 moons in a stable orbit like Phobos and Deimos. But what if they weren't? What if 100 years before a new moon showed up. The old moon was thrown into an elliptical orbit. Now you have some adventure possible. The 2 moons are not in a stable orbit and are jockeying for position. High tides when both are closer are higher than anything in recorded history. Low tides expose the ocean floor for miles.
It would be very tough to predict what tides would do. That might work for your story. Plus if the arrival of the moon were historically recent the shock of unpredictable tides would impact society harder.
with how Willk says it there is little else to say, but one thing here is that you could get the moons in a type of twin orbit, but with a twist, one moon orbits the other sometimes, this could make the tides very, very high, or very very low, if the moons are at a sufficient distance you wont have to worry of the second moon crashing into your planet, and there are more variable key factors, such as the pull of the moons, their size, the gravity of your planet, the sun, the atmosphere gasses, and so much more, also another factor is the actual water, is oxygen diluted in it, is salt? etc.
edit: i forgot the size of the star, the type, the zone you are in farther or closer, and the actaul size of your planet : )
i know this is not the answer you were looking for, but i hpe this helps, also this would do great on the astronomy and physics stackexchanges also, for this kind of questions you need to add the hard science tag
