3D Marine Surveys

Marine retrofit and refit engineering depends on a fundamental input: an accurate, complete record of what is actually inside the vessel. Construction drawings are rarely current, on-board equipment has shifted, piping has been rerouted, and the space available for new systems — a ballast water treatment unit, a scrubber, a new firefighting line, a fresh cargo crane base — has to fit in a real engine room, not the one drawn twenty years ago. We solve this with high-accuracy 3D laser scanning.

Astrolabe Engineering has been scanning vessels since 2005, and has delivered surveys on more than 250 vessels to date — from sailing yachts and motor yachts to tankers, bulk carriers and cruise ships. The bulk of our retrofit work is done in long-standing partnership with HYDRUS Engineering, our strategic partner for naval architecture and retrofit design (see our Company page).

What we scan

• Ballast Water Treatment System (BWTS) retrofits — Engine rooms, pump rooms, ballast tanks and the piping runs that connect them, captured in enough detail for the BWTS to be designed in 3D and dropped into the existing space without on-board rework.
• Exhaust Gas Cleaning System (EGCS / scrubber) retrofits — Engine casings, funnels, exhaust runs and surrounding decks, captured for scrubber siting, ducting design and structural reinforcement studies.
• Other engineering retrofits — Nitrogen generators, boilers, CO₂ firefighting systems, mechanical ventilation in cargo spaces, emergency towing systems, cargo handling cranes, cargo loading manifolds, cargo tank heating coils, and other added-equipment installations.
• Hull inspection and naval design support — Hull, decks, draft marks and structural detail captured for inspection, naval-architecture redesign, line drawing extraction and offsets.
• Damage documentation — Pre-repair record of damaged areas — collision, fire, weather — captured in 3D for repair planning and insurance documentation.
• Motor yachts, sailing yachts and smaller vessels — Hull, deck, interior arrangement and equipment scanning for refit design, custom fabrication and replacement-part design.
• Traditional and historic wooden vessels — High-resolution scanning of protected and historic vessels for documentation, exhibition and digital archive. See our 3D Cultural Heritage Documentation solution for our work on eight protected traditional Aegean vessels with the Samos Cultural Foundation.
• Shipyard work — vessel components of any kind — Scanning of any vessel component handled by a shipyard, from structural members, machinery foundations and deck fittings to specialised installations. At Salamis Shipyards, for example, Astrolabe has 3D-scanned weapon-system bases — a context where millimetre alignment to a fixed reference frame is non-negotiable.

Why static laser scanning

Marine retrofit design needs millimetre-grade accuracy. The piping, electrical and mechanical equipment that has to clear the new installation is dense, awkwardly shaped and unforgiving of misalignment. Mobile (SLAM) scanning, however convenient, accumulates drift over the long, repetitive interior runs of an engine room — and at 3 mm of accuracy that drift quickly becomes a problem.

We therefore work on board with static (tripod-mounted) laser scanning. Our FARO scanners are light (under 5 kg) and small enough to set up between piping runs, under low ceilings, on stair landings and in cramped pump-room corners. The full equipment list is on our 3D Laser Scanning service page.

Portable SLAM scanners have advanced significantly in recent years, and we are actively evaluating their incorporation into our marine survey workflow in combination with static laser scanning — extending coverage and speed where appropriate, while static scans continue to anchor the dataset and maintain the millimetre accuracy the design work depends on.

How a typical job runs

• On-board team: one Astrolabe surveyor with the scanning equipment, alongside one technician — either from the client side or from a project partner working with us — to coordinate with the crew, identify the spaces to be captured, prepare them (panel removal, obstruction clearance, crew rotation), and brief us on areas of special interest.
• Logistics: the shipping company arranges travel and the local agent handles transport to/from the vessel; we typically need around 48 hours on board to complete the scanning works.
• Scan plan: 100–300 scan stations per vessel, depending on vessel size and areas to be scanned.
• Resolution and accuracy: 5 mm scan resolution, ±1–3 mm range accuracy.
• Georeferencing: every dataset is aligned to the vessel’s own coordinate system — X along the centerline (X=0 at frame 0), Z=0 at the baseline — so the survey drops straight into the construction drawings rather than needing a separate registration step.
• Office processing: point cloud generation per station, cleaning and filtering, alignment between stations, RGB colour optimisation (engine rooms are dark, and we do a lot of work to recover usable colour), and final QC against the scan plan.

Deliverables

• Georeferenced colour point clouds — RGB and intensity, aligned to the ship coordinate system.
• Native format: Autodesk ReCap (.rcp / .rcs), the default for downstream design in Plant 3D and the rest of the Autodesk stack.
• Other formats on request: .fls, .e57, .xyz, .pts, .las, AVEVA LFM database, FARO WebShare interactive panoramas.
• CAD-ready drawings extracted from the point cloud, where these are part of the scope (line drawings, offsets, deck plans).

How we work with retrofit designers and equipment providers

Most of our marine retrofit surveys are delivered into a wider engineering team — naval architects, retrofit designers, equipment manufacturers and yard personnel. The work-sharing pattern is consistent: the design office takes the 3D point cloud, designs the retrofit, and supervises the installation; Astrolabe delivers the spatial record that lets their design work first time, in yard. We are equally comfortable taking the scan-scope brief directly from the owner, the manager, the designer, the equipment vendor or the shipyard — whoever owns the project end.

Talk to us about a vessel project

Planning a BWTS or scrubber installation, a major refit, a hull inspection, or the documentation of a historic vessel? We mobilise worldwide and have done so for owners, managers, naval architects and yards across the Mediterranean, Northern Europe, the Atlantic and the Black Sea. Get in touch →