Talk:Deck (ship)

As a retired naval architect and shipbuilder, I have struggled for decades with marine jargon. Do people make a ship fast with ropes, or warps, or cordage, or lines, or even wires? Do they make fast to a chock or to a bollard? The fact is, our industry is full of jargon, and because it is an international industry, all manner of strange terms can creep in. You will find that engineers aboard Mærsk ships call a hydraulic accumulator in a fresh water system a 'hydrophore', which a deck officer might understand to be an instrument for taking water samples. It can be like the Tower of Babel.

But simple English Wikipedia is intended for use by people whose first language is not English, and I think we owe it to them to keep things simple. I was very tempted to entirely revise the list of deck names, but out of respect for whoever put them there in the first place, I haven't. For example, the list says Orlop Deck is the lowest deck in a ship. But that most certainly will confuse a person standing on the double bottom tank top, which by the article's definition, is a deck. Similarly, people unacquainted with ships might well ask what is the difference between weather deck and sun deck? What do we say? Sun Deck must be a weather deck, but in particular, it is a place where people relax in the sun? I think this illustrates the confusion experienced people whose first language is not English.

It seems to me that in commercial vessels over 24m long on international service, by far the most important deck is the Freeboard Deck (to use ICLL terms). I have therefore added a simple description of the Freeboard Deck, and described a system of naming decks that uses the Freeboard Deck as reference, and which allows new officers and crew to immediately understand which deck is being spoken about. 85.80.224.22 (talk) 15:03, 4 August 2019 (UTC) Alan Graham Robinson