On Tue, Aug 12, 2014 at 1:34 PM, Bruce Johnson
<johnson@pharmacy.arizona.edu> wrote:
>
> So we’re in Leonard’s old ship, they get to the service depot and all they have is a first edition copy, one with (like my old Honda manual, which broke in half over the years and lost a few pages there in the middle, covering disassembly and repair of the standard 5-speed transmission) a couple corrupted and unreadable sections, plus (lets be real here, this is a ship from "Shattered Ships of the Fighting Imperium", lets say) none of the later errata releases :-)
>

Back in the days when I worked in the Airlines, a lot of the
mods/repairs/etc were documented in both the airline HQ and shops, and
in the books in the aircraft itself.
And there were pretty hard-core FAA regs on them.

I'd think in a TL11+ ship, there would be a lot more, and easier, docs
than we're used to.
There's a set of comments in the Vilani book about most documentation
being trouble determination trees and SOPs for
repair/replace/maintain.
I can picture the computer providing "Instructables" style
text-and-video on maintaining just about everything in the ship.
One would just place their hand computer nearby, answer the questions
and do the task as described.
As a bonus, the computer would _log_ that the task was done, and any
comments the person doing it added.
If a jury rig were done, each of those steps would be logged and
probably imaged.

Add in the standard boilerplate about the Vilani influence and "As a
culture, we've been handling starship maintenance documentation since
the Solomani were beginning to use Roman Numerals" and I think the 3I
would have a better handle on this issue than this.