Marine and Naval Engineering Editing and Proofreading Services

Stability is the one calculation on a ship that has to be redone by someone else, at sea, at night, without the naval architect. The vessel's safety in any given condition depends on a master or a chief officer working through loading figures under time pressure, using a booklet produced years earlier by an engineer who will never meet them. Ships have been lost because that booklet was technically correct and practically unusable.

We edit what naval architects and marine engineers produce — stability information booklets and loading condition documentation, trim and stability calculations and their presentation, damage stability and survivability documentation, loading and ballast manuals, cargo securing manuals, machinery operating and maintenance manuals, class and flag submission documentation, technical specifications for new build and conversion, survey and inspection reports, safety management system procedures and checklists, dry dock and repair specifications, and operating limitation and permitted-condition documentation. Our editors work on the document the person on watch has to use.

The stability information booklet is the highest-consequence document in marine engineering, and its usability is a separate quality from its accuracy. A booklet can be right in every figure and still fail the officer trying to check a departure condition at two in the morning with a pilot due. We work through these so the conditions presented cover what the ship actually does rather than the idealised set, including partial loads, slack tanks and the awkward intermediate conditions where problems live; so free surface effects are explained in the terms that produce a decision — which tanks to press up and which to empty — rather than only as a correction in a table; so each condition states plainly whether it passes every criterion and which one it is closest to, because an officer needs to know the margin they are working within and not merely that a condition is approved; so limiting conditions and the ones that must never be used appear as prominently as the approved ones; so the worked example is genuinely worked, with the arithmetic shown, since an example that skips steps teaches nothing to someone learning the ship; and so the language is consistent with the labels physically on the tanks and the deck. Booklets written this way get used, which is the property that matters at two in the morning.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including vessel data, calculations and owner information. We are editors rather than naval architects or marine engineers, and we offer no view on stability, calculations or operational limits. What we can do is make a correct document usable by the person who has to apply it.