Naval Shipbuilding Editing and Proofreading Services

Sea trials find twenty-three discrepancies. Fourteen are logged as "resolved" before the vessel is accepted, and the acceptance report does not distinguish between the discrepancy that was actually fixed, the one that was tested again and found acceptable within tolerance, and the one that was simply noted as "will be addressed under warranty" and then marked resolved anyway because the spreadsheet only had two columns: open and closed. The vessel is accepted into service carrying at least one discrepancy that nobody currently tracking anything believes is actually fixed.

We edit what shipyards, naval architects and trials teams produce during construction and sea trials — sea trials discrepancy logs and disposition records, non-conformance reports and their close-out, acceptance and delivery documentation, builder's trial and contractor's sea trial reports, warranty and post-delivery defect tracking, and the correspondence between shipyard and customer about an open item. Our editors work on the record that decides what a warship is actually accepted with.

The disposition category is what determines whether a discrepancy log tells the truth about a vessel's condition at acceptance, and its failure is a binary open-or-closed status applied to outcomes that are not actually the same thing. Resolved conceals whether something was fixed, tested and passed, or simply deferred. We work through these so each discrepancy is closed with a specific disposition — corrected and verified, tested within tolerance, accepted as-is with a stated reason, or deferred to warranty with a date — rather than a single closed status that erases the difference, since a reader relying on the log to understand what the vessel actually is needs to know which of these actually happened; so a deferred item is carried forward with its own tracking number into the warranty period rather than closed out of the trials record, given that closing it in one system and opening it in another, without a clear link, is how deferred items disappear from view entirely; so the verification method is stated for anything marked corrected, because a repair that was re-tested under the original trial conditions and one that was simply re-inspected visually carry different confidence; so an item accepted as-is includes the engineering justification for why it is acceptable, as "accepted as-is" with no reason attached is indistinguishable from an item nobody got round to fixing; so the acceptance report states, as a total, how many open and deferred items the vessel carries into service, rather than only listing items individually across pages, given that a reader needs the aggregate picture as well as the detail; and so responsibility for a deferred item — shipyard, subcontractor, or owner-accepted risk — is named, since an item with no owner is an item nobody follows up. Logs written this way mean a vessel is accepted with an accurate picture of its own condition.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including trials data, technical records and contractual correspondence. We are editors rather than naval architects, marine engineers or trials officers, and we offer no view on seaworthiness, acceptance criteria or technical findings. What we can do is make sure the disposition on the page matches what actually happened.