The idea of creating the model more or less in real-time as they walk through the ship is what I find most compelling.
I want to know what laptops they're using. No way your standard sissy macbook pro is being taken out there where it can get wet and batteries might not be charged for a while.
I was not a salvage guy but in cargo measurement it turns out I had one of the first "laptops" on the Gulf Coast.
We used "regular" 16-digit hand calculators for regular calculations from ships' calibration tables, but when a vessel (especially heavy oil tankers) was far enough
from even keel then the tables would not apply, and hand modeling was very tedious, so I developed a more realistic model on the "PC".
Radio Shack PC-2 (Pocket Computer) with accessories and case was about the size of a small laptop, including a 4-color printer-plotter, and RS-232 interface:
This was way before IBM-compatible laptop PC's were developed.
You have to board the vessel for access to its dimensional drawings, and if they were inadequate then you would take hand measurements.
My application was fundamentally way more advanced than the few oil companies doing it on a TRS-80 themselves, and that was just the calculations and conversions.
I can look back without embarrassment at my UI/UX, computer-experienced marine gagers did not yet exist, home computers still very uncommon, and most offices not yet having
a computer either.
Gagers still have a fairly challenging job but most are not very academically oriented, even more true decades ago.
So I made it where you just hand the portable to the gager, he hits the "ON" button, it asks the questions on the one-line LED screen, then prints the questions & his answers
on the little printer and the ticket advances as the calculations proceed for each compartment.
You finished hours before the company gager, and could go back over all data & results just by looking through the ticket.
The real excitement was boarding an offshore platform in the Bahamas one time with 20' waves and the crew boat was only about 30' long. They had multiple wooden landings to accomodate the tides, one was virtually submerged, the next was slightly below the waves' crest and the third was
out-of-reach at the time.
A knotted rope descended from the main metal platform at the top of the ladder, draping all 3 landings.
Each worker waited for the pilot to sync a wave properly, then he would quickly reverse the boat to within inches of the target landing, you step off the back of the boat grabbing the wet rope, hang & swing onto the landing as the boat drops a dozen feet the next second and he powers away to a safe distance to repeat it for the next person.
Climb the ladder quick before the next wave submerges the landing you are on.
Here's the rest of the page about the TRS-80 portables:
I want to know what laptops they're using. No way your standard sissy macbook pro is being taken out there where it can get wet and batteries might not be charged for a while.
Toughbook maybe?