The making of delicate adjustments

From Alastair Reynolds' superb short story, Weather, anthologised in Galaxtic North, here is an account of the shipmaster of the lighthugger Petronel tuning the drive in an attempt to escape a shipload of pursuing pirates:

So I went to the engines themselves, to see if I could better my nameless opponent. I crawled out along the pressurised spar, out to the coupling point where the foreign technology of the starboard Conjoiner drive was mated to the fabric of the Petronel. There I opened the hatch that gave access to the controls of the drive itself: six stiff dials, fashioned in blue metal, arranged in hexagon formation, each of which was tied to some fundamental aspect of the engine's function. The dials were set into quadrant-shaped recesses, all now glowing a calm blue-green.

I noted the existing settings, then made near-microscopic alterations three of the six dials, fighting to keep my hands steady as I applied the necessary effort to budge them. Even as I made the first alteration, I felt the engine respond: a shiver of power as some arcane process occurred deep inside it, accompanied by a shift in my own weight as the thrust increased by five or six per cent. The blue-green hue was now tinted with orange.

Reynolds, A., (2006), Galatic North, Gollancz, 118

It seems to me that Reynolds, through Inigo, perfectly describes the process of making delicate change to subtle machines equipped with a manifestly clunky interface. He also happens perfectly to describe the delicate process of adjusting storage heaters so as to surf the narrow band of tolerable warmth that lies but a near-microscopic setting away from colder than the vacuum of space on one side and hotter than the heart of a star on the other.