On Fri, Sep 5, 2014 at 6:04 AM, Andrew Long <andrew.long@mac.com> wrote:

In ELizabeth Moon's 'Heris Serrano' series, Heris goes all ballistic about various pipe and cable runs being hidden away behind 'pretty' wall coverings. There's a bit of description in the first couple of chapters to give you a feel for the kind of image you'd have all over the ship, as well as in engineering and hydroponics.

I still fondly recall the first scene of *Hunting Party.*

From memory: Serrano is grilling an envirotech about why the main sewage sludge tank of the (cruiser-sized) yatch she's skippering has backed-up and stopped working. There are only a small percentage of the rated crew aboard, so she's assuming that the lazy tech has simply skipped too much routine maintenance and faked the records accordingly. Then the guy who would be Chief of Boat on an actual cruiser takes her aside and gently informs her that the actual problem is *probably* that one or more of the "small packages" which the tech most likely has hidden in the tank has come adrift and gummed up the works . . .