The engine room as a workshop

The list of things a crew will print is short, and it is not the list in the sales deck. Clips, brackets, a fan shroud, a cover for a gauge, a handle that snapped in a doorway. Things whose failure is a nuisance.¹¹ The survey in the references is a sample, standing in for the trial reports a real review would have read. The list of things a crew will not print is the plant itself. A valve in a fuel line, a pump impeller, anything a surveyor will ask to see the papers for.

A decade of trials has not changed that line so much as made it visible. The printer rides well enough. The powder, or the filament, rides less well, and the person who knows the machine is not always the person on watch. What the trials produced, where they were written down, was a drawer of non-critical parts and a clearer argument with the class society about the boundary.²² Class guidance, in the sample note, draws the line at pressure and at anything whose failure is not obvious to the watch.

The sober reading is that the engine room already is a workshop. It has a lathe, a vice, and a chief engineer who has been making a bad part last until the next port for as long as there have been ships. A printer is another tool in that workshop. It becomes interesting to the journal only when someone proposes to fit the part to a system that can flood, burn or stop the ship. Until a class society will sign that part, the printer is a convenience. It is not a store of pressure parts.