Collision detection between several objects in a closed space is of fundamental importance in all those areas where objects must not penetrate one another, such as computer grafics, robotics, motion planning, computer animation, virtual reality, etc. The problem to detect collisions in very complex systems has been studied by several authors, obtaining solutions based on different data structures. In this paper, a new K dimensional tree Multiresolution Kdtree, MKtree is introduced. The MKtree represents a hierarchical subdivision of the scene objects that guarantees a minimum space overlap between node regions. MKtrees are useful for collision detection and for time--critical rendering in very large environments requiring external memory storage. Examples in ship design applications are described.