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... especially one big enough for a medium sized mermaid to swim around in, say 8x8x4 feet holding 950 gallons, or for a small sized creature
i.e. a halfling, 4x4x2 feet holding 121.5 gallons.
Would Walls of Force be required to reinforce the glass? Or maybe made of metal with permanent transparency spell.
Ideas please?
Since 256 cubic feet is 1915 Gallons, and 32 cubic feet is 240 Gallon, I assume you are filling them less than halfway?
That being said, the "larger" aquarium will be holding just shy of 8 tons of water (assuming full, 4 tons if half) you'll need something pretty strong. (Steel's yield strength as a .5mm sheet is around 200 MPa and you'll be well below that, roughly 0.01MPa)
Permanent Wall of Force would be my choice, although Transparent Steel should work, there used to be a spell called "Glass steel" which made any steel transparent, but it seems to not be in PF1. Voidglass seems to be the new Equivalent.
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I was taking the numbers from Mermaid Melissa's Travelling Aquariums on their website.
so I assumed they were full. Let's just go with the measurements and say that they are full.
Void glass sounds really expensive so it might be that the Wall of Force method is the way to go, so to reduce costs, let's just say one side is transparent.
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There's a normal sized aquarium in the familiar folio: Aquarium Ball.
If you considered it like armor for unusual creatures, you could use the cost increase from the crb. So a large aquarium to fit a small creature would cost 320gp, and a huge aquarium to fit a medium creature would be 640gp.
If you look at that website, the tanks are 1.5 inch thick acrylic walls. Assuming those dimensions are exterior, then the inside is actually 3 inches shorter than that, or 7.75x7.75x3.75, making it closer to 200 cubic feet, which is about 1500 gallons. So 950 gallons would fill close to 2/3rds of the tank, which is probably all you can put in since a person is going to fill up the rest of the space.
the next question then arises, Can a Wall of Force be moved? (Assuming you want to be able to relocate the aquarium)
The spell description and the way we have always played it seems to imply that it is immovable.
7.75x7.75x3.75 yields 225 cubic feet, which is 1683 gallons, 950 gallons is 56% of that volume. an average human being is about 17 gallons, which would make the tank 57.5% full. I'm not sure I trust the numbers on the mermaid site... but that's all speculation.
My first choice is still Permanent Force Wall.
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Immovable is relative though, depending on your frame of reference. What if you have a Wall of Force on a ship .... or a wagon. I presume it would move with the object it's attached to - presumably at least one edge has to be placed on something.
((I had one PC use a Rod of Immovability to make sure his telescope wouldn't be affected by external vibrations - but that's another story - and technically you'd need three - one for each axis of movement))
And, as for scaling up the Aquarium Ball, looks like my initial guesses of 500 and 1000gp for both sizes weren't too far off.
Well you could harden the glass by treating it as a miscellaneous magic item permanently treating it with wall of force.
Possibly cheaper, is you make a massively big batch of gelatin and hit it with flesh to stone turning it into quartz. Quartz is as hard as normal stone.