That’s viXra

Once upon a time, editors requested submissions in single-column, double-spaced form because they (or the in-house writers) would actually mark on the printed-out paper. Mysterious glyphs, squiggly arrows, and indecipherable handwritten text would be inscribed between the lines in red ink. Many journal preprints from that era are double-spaced.

Even more mysterious are the arcane notations such as “TABLE 1 ABOUT HERE” with the actual table/figure contents placed at the end of the paper. Understandable when authors provided hardcopy figures for photoreproduction, baffling when the entire submission was generated with LaTeX or Word.

The deepest compartments (below the waterline) are often like this. It is not always possible for taller equipment spaces (engineering, magazines) in small ships. Crew berthing is often below the waterline and accessed via deck hatches as you say, but you do end up with hard choices when the space is flooding and people are still unaccounted for. Hope you can stabilize the ship or run it aground before it sinks, or 100% guarantee that some crew will drown?

Above the waterline, it is common to have “loops” of passageways for movement of equipment and people (including casualties). Firemain stations will be spaced along such a loop because they are used to both fight nearby fires and dewater the compartments below.

Can’t speak for the Norwegians but that is not how at-sea watchstanding works in, e.g., the US Navy. The OOD is the captain’s delegate in operating the ship. In peacetime steaming, there may not be another khaki (officer or chief petty officer) on watch who is qualified to stand OOD - the JOOD/JOOW is typically a trainee, and the CIC watch officer is often a non-OOD-qualified junior officer or chief petty officer. They can and should all provide support to the OOD but usually nobody is available to babysit or step in. All of the babysitting should have happened before the OOD ever got their OOD qual.

Which btw tells you what has gone wrong in many of these situations: the OOD was given a qualification they were not ready for, because not having enough OODs means the actually-qualified OODs will be standing port/starboard watch and be exhausted all the time. COs and XOs give the weak OODs quiet steaming watches they think will be easy, but a shipping channel can get busy earlier than expected and everything can go to shit really quickly.