Equipment types and what gates a piece of work

A fleet is not interchangeable. A fork barge handles most docks and standard lifts; a heavy or awkward lift wants the crane; some bays will ground out anything but the small barge. LakeOps models that, because it is the single most common reason a crew arrives and cannot finish.

Types and units

Thing	What it is
Equipment type	A kind of gear: fork barge, crane barge, small barge, truck and trailer. Carries a color used on the map and a typical crew size.
Equipment	An actual unit you own, with a name the crew uses, a type, its own color and a crew capacity. This is what you tick when you deploy.

Manage your units under Settings → Equipment. Give each one the name your crews say out loud, and set its type — the type is what all the gating works from.

Where a requirement comes from

Two places, and there is a rule for which wins:

• The item. “That lift needs the crane.” A fact about a specific piece of equipment.
• The property. “You cannot get the big barge into that bay.” A fact about the shoreline, and it applies to everything there.

Items can also record how many crew they take. Most take whatever is aboard; the awkward ones do not, and it is worth writing down once rather than discovering it twice.

What a job needs is worked out, not stored

A job requires whatever its items require, plus whatever the property demands to get there at all — computed each time it is asked. Change an item’s requirement and every open job reflects it immediately. There is no stored answer to go stale.

How the gate actually behaves

When you deploy a crew, LakeOps knows the kinds of gear aboard and how many people. For each item it can then say one of three things:

• nothing — go and do it;
• “Needs the crane barge” — the required type is not on this boat;
• “Needs 3 on deck” — not enough crew recorded aboard.

Note what it does not do: it does not hide the stop. The crew can see the whole property, including what they cannot finish, because knowing there is a crane job waiting at the third dock is how tomorrow gets planned. They do everything they can and the rest stays pending.

A deployment with nobody ticked as aboard means unknown, not zero — a missed checkbox will never block a day’s work.

On the map

Each equipment type has a color, and it is drawn as the ring around a property pin and as the color of the item pins. From the office you can see which shorelines want the crane before you decide where to send it tomorrow. See reading the map.