FOR THE WATCH
Works mid-ocean, no signal, data stays aboard
Rounds on a tablet that never needs a satellite, an assistant that answers questions about this plant with no link to shore, and the trend you want at 0300 on the screen instead of in a binder. What shore sees about this plant is the daily rollup this ship sends, and none of it is used for individual performance appraisal.
It works when nothing else does
Everything runs on the ship. Android tablets for the round, a Windows hub, and a Raspberry Pi display in the engine room, with all data held locally in an Isar database. The assistant runs aboard too, so it answers with no internet at all. Starlink down, mid-Pacific, terminal Wi-Fi refusing to associate: none of it stops a round.
- Zero connectivity required for any core function. Not degraded mode, not cached mode. Local.
- Tablets, hub and Pi display all work off data held on the ship; there is no cloud call in the path between you and the reading.
- The AI assistant runs on ship hardware and answers off this ship's own rounds data, offline.
- When there is a link, the ship sends roughly two small documents a day, typically under 5 KB total — and that budget includes up to 8 compressed issue photos. The raw history and the rest of the media stay aboard.
Shore's picture is the one this ship sends
There is one daily rollup. It is built from what the watch entered, and it describes the plant, not the watchstander. No stopwatch, no time-per-round ranking of people, no keystroke counting, and no individual performance appraisal — that is a product rule, not a setting someone can flip.
- The rollup carries rounds compliance, worklist stats, alarm state, about 20 headline trends with 30-day series and 2-sigma anomaly counts, consumption rates (fuel t/day, cylinder LO L/day), plant changeovers, equipment status, recent notes, up to 8 compressed issue photos, a readiness score 0-100 with its component breakdown, and an AI context digest.
- The shore dashboard is password-protected and is built from that rollup: readiness dial and component breakdown, a needs-attention panel, this-ship-vs-class charts, the issue-photo grid, and a Windy weather map carrying AIS positions with 24-hour dead-reckoned tracks. Every number on your ship's page came off this ship.
- The fleet league table ranks hulls by readiness score, never engineers. With one hull sending real rollups today, the other four rows on it are demo data and are labelled that way.
- What the ship cannot pull back today is the shore side's cross-hull view — the fleet insights down-link to the tablet is [in build]. Until it lands, shore holds nothing about this plant that you did not enter aboard, but the comparison across hulls only renders ashore.
- You sign in as yourself — tap your name, and a PIN if one is set on your account — so a reading is filed under you and a closed job records who closed it. That exists so evidence is attributable and dated under 33 CFR 96.120, not to score anyone: the rollup that goes ashore still describes the plant, and the only name in it is whoever took the most recent round.
The round itself
The round is a template built around this plant, not a blank sheet. Elements come in the order the plant is actually walked because someone aboard built the template that way, alarm conditions are evaluated as you enter the reading rather than by somebody reading the sheet the next morning, and the note you write at 0400 carries forward instead of being retold at turnover. No timed comparison against paper is published here, because nobody has run one; what is removed is the write-it-then-copy-it-then-go-find-last-week's-value loop.
- 16 element types — among them numeric readings, paired IN/OUT, pass/fail, sliders, multi-select, datetime, media, notes, headers and ranges.
- Inline alarm evaluation with configurable conditions, flagged as the number goes in.
- Equipment groups hold running / standby / hibernation state, and a changeover is captured when you make it.
- Watch notes with photos, carried forward to the next watch.
- Worklist items with priorities and photos, pending-review and pending-approval states, soft delete and restore so a mis-tap is not a lost item. Shore approval comes back as an email reply, APPROVE or REJECT, and the state change lands on your tablet at the next sync.
The trend at 0300, and something to ask
Sparklines sit on the reading, with the run of earlier readings behind them. A computed-metrics engine does the arithmetic you would otherwise do on the back of the printout: deltas, rates per hour or per day, two-element expressions, with unit conversion. The Pi display in the engine room runs boards you build, and the assistant answers questions about this plant's data with no link to shore.
- Computed metrics give fuel t/day and cylinder oil L/day directly, without a calculator and a guessed elapsed time.
- The engine-room display builder includes a maintenance date-tracker board, seeded from this vessel's actual whiteboard with the NS5 PMS intervals.
- Weekly report with an AI summary, and TSV export when you want the numbers somewhere else. Treat the summary as a starting point and check it against the readings.
- A digital engine-log (Form 629) view exists, and the field mapping is partial: roughly 230 of its ~425 boxes are wired to an element in the duty round, the noon numbers or the daily soundings, and the rest — the cylinder temperature bands, turbochargers, bearing and shaft temperatures, reefer spaces — are not collected by the rounds and come out blank. Check it against your own entries before you lean on it.
- The assistant answers from the ship's rounds data, aboard. It is not reading the manuals or NS5.
What is next, and what it is waiting on
Five near-identical hulls is the whole point, and the cross-hull engineering work is not live yet. Deviation bands need at least three ships sending real rollups; today exactly one does. The other four show clearly-labelled demo data on the shore dashboard, and no cross-hull figure gets published while that is true. AIS is the one fleet-wide feed already on the shore map, with three of the five hulls seen reporting real positions — and that tells you where a ship is, not how her plant is running.
- Sister-ship deviation bands, so "is this normal?" has an answer: your reading against the envelope from four near-identical plants. in build — needs three or more hulls on real rollups
- A fleet failure library: a card written once when a fix is found on one hull, readable on the other four. in build
- Contextual hints and safety flashes down-linked to the tablet, inside the same tiny sync budget. in build
- Defect lifecycle with shore-acknowledgement fields and an exportable open-defect register, plus a contractor / riding-squad handoff pack. in build
- Rest-hours module, and true-copy PDF exports for incident or survey evidence bundles. in build
What is shipped, and what is not
This table is the point of the page. It is written to be read by a sceptic, and it is kept honest deliberately — every claim here is checkable against the running system.
| Capability | Status | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Fully offline operation (tablets, hub, Pi display, on-ship AI) | Shipped | All data local in Isar. No core function requires connectivity. Running at sea now. |
| Templated rounds, 16 element types, inline alarm evaluation | Shipped | Conditions evaluated as the reading is entered. Admin round builder with versioned draft/published templates and due-dated assignments — which is also how the recurring required tests under 46 CFR 97.35-5 and 46 CFR Part 61 (pre-departure steering, whistle and comms, weekly and semi-annual emergency power, monthly cargo gear, fuel received, periodic machinery and automation tests) can be tracked as due-dated items. |
| Trends, computed metrics, engine-room display boards | Shipped | Sparklines, deltas, rates per hour/day, two-element expressions, unit conversion. Pi kiosk boards include a maintenance date tracker on NS5 intervals. |
| Worklist with photos and shore approval by email | Shipped | Priorities, pending review, pending approval, soft delete/restore. Shore replies APPROVE or REJECT; the state change reaches the tablet at the next sync. |
| Unofficial machinery log (46 CFR 97.35-3) | Shipped | That regulation lets the engine-room / unofficial machinery log be kept in any preferred format, kept aboard at least a year and available to marine inspectors, and LOOP can lawfully serve as that today. 46 USC 11304 allows official logbook entries in any form, including electronic — that is about form, not about LOOP being the official log. Records are still mutable and capacity-capped, so watch your retention and export what you need to keep. |
| Digital engine log (Form 629) view | Shipped | The view is there and the mapping is partial — about 230 of ~425 boxes are fed from round data, the remainder print blank. Do not treat it as a finished Form 629 replacement; verify entries before submitting anything. |
| Append-only, signed, tamper-evident record store | In build | Blunt version: today's shipboard record layer is mutable and capacity-capped. It is not an evidence trail, and nobody here will call it one until the hash-chained store lands. |
| Named sign-in aboard (per-user authentication) | In build | There is no per-user ship-side auth today, so per-reading attribution is not yet meaningful. Purpose when it arrives: attributable, dated ISM evidence under 33 CFR 96.120, never individual appraisal. |
| Sister-ship deviation bands, fleet failure library, safety flashes | In build | Deviation bands need three or more hulls on real rollups. One hull is real today; the other four are demo data and labelled as such. The failure library and the down-linked hints ride the same link and are not shipping yet. |
| Replacing the CG-706 Official Logbook, MARPOL record books, or NS5 PMS | Not planned | Keep those exactly as you keep them now. A MARPOL electronic record book requires USCG NVIC 01-23 acceptance via an ACS attestation to IMO Res. MEPC.312(74), and LOOP has not done that. LOOP does not replace a PMS, inventory, procurement or crew-management system; an NS5 read-only bridge is [in build], and read-only means read-only. |
What this is not
What this is not, for you specifically. It is not a PMS: it will not close your NS5 jobs, raise a requisition, or track spares. It is not an accepted MARPOL electronic record book and it does not replace the CG-706 Official Logbook — legally it cannot today — so the ORB and the official log stay exactly as they are. The shipboard records are still mutable and capacity-capped, so do not treat a screen as evidence in an incident or a survey until the append-only store lands, and export what you need to keep. Sign-in is aboard, but do not over-read it: your name sits in the storage key rather than inside the reading, so the trend, alarm and consumption screens read back anonymous; an account with no PIN set opens on one tap; and the hub accepts round data from anywhere on the ship's network without checking who sent it, so a reading could be filed under your name by someone else. Attribution is real enough to be useful and not yet solid enough to be evidence. One hull is sending real data; the four sisters on the shore dashboard are demo, so any fleet comparison on that screen right now is a mock-up with a label on it. The AI summaries are a starting point, not a checked reading. And there is no savings, ROI or minutes-per-round figure anywhere on this page, because none has been measured. Adding a tablet to the round does not remove a duty from it.