AHOY watches the water around your ship through HD and thermal cameras, day and night, and tells the bridge what is out there, what it is doing, and which part of your vessel it endangers.
A skiff on an intercept is visible long before it is obvious. The difficulty was never seeing it once — it was seeing it early, every time, without crying wolf at every whitecap.
A corsair sailed under letters of marque — a pirate turned lawful, set to hunt his own kind. He was worth having because he already knew the trade: where they wait, how they close, and what they do in the last mile.
AHOY is built the same way. It does not look for boats. It looks for the behaviour of an attack.
A skiff carrying four fishermen and a skiff carrying four men with a ladder are the same object in the same pixels. No amount of image recognition separates them. What separates them is how they move.
Finds craft far beyond the range at which they are obvious to a lookout, in daylight, darkness, glare and a running sea.
Several cameras, visible and thermal, fused into one picture. Overlapping views become one contact, not three. A blind arc is reported before it matters.
Cross-checks every contact against the ship's own AIS and radar. A vessel that announces itself is accounted for. A small, fast one that does not is the finding.
Steady bearing with closing range means an intercept — a contact steering for where you will be. That, plus speed and the arc it works toward, is the signature.
Not "bearing 143, 2.4 miles". The sector, the point on the hull, and the exposed access nearest to it — the door somebody needs to go and secure.
Records the minutes before the alarm, not just after, and logs the reasoning behind every escalation. An alert you cannot interrogate is one the watch learns to ignore.
The overlay shows what AHOY concluded — contacts, classification, range, bearing and threat level, with a plan view of where each bears relative to the ship.
Escalation requires the assessment to hold. Coming back down takes markedly longer than going up — falling silent early is the dangerous error, and a system that flickers is one the bridge stops trusting.
Tracked and unremarkable. Nothing annunciated.
Worth an eye. On the display, no audible.
Behaving like a threat. Audible on the bridge; master informed.
Assessed hostile approach. Ship's alarm, anti-piracy measures, access secured.
Closing to boarding range. General alarm; citadel.
Set a contact's range, speed, bearing behaviour and whether it is declared on AIS — and watch AHOY grade it, factor by factor, with the reasoning it would put in front of the watch officer.