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Which Sensor Sets Your Line Spacing?
Usually not the one you planned around. A worked example of why an offshore survey line plan should start from the specification, not from the multibeam brochure.
Ask a room of survey planners how they set line spacing and most will give you a number before you have finished the question. Three times water depth. Seventy-five metres. Whatever we ran on the neighbouring block last year. I have given all of those answers myself, usually at eleven at night with a tender due at noon.
A note on how this piece was made: I draft with AI assistance and the diagrams are drawn in code. The method, the numbers and the opinions are mine, and I have checked every one of them.
The trouble is that line spacing is not a habit. It is the answer to a physics question, and on a multi-sensor survey it is the answer to several physics questions at once. The tightest one wins. Get it wrong and you either miss the specification or pay for kilometres nobody needed, and on an offshore wind site characterisation the gap between those two mistakes is measured in vessel days.
