quote:
Originally posted by suicide_junkie:
Problem: what if you put two repair bays on a ship?
With repair bays as top priority, the first will repair the ship, then the second will repair the first + more of the ship.
Next round, the first repairs the second + more ship
And so on. You would just halve your repair rate.
Only If both bays were undamaged and couldn't repair the entire ship in one turn, then they might both be used & destroyed at the same time.
Well, "halve" is a relative term. Yeah, you couldn't have both working at once in the scenario you describe. But if you're just looking at the repair rate of a single component, your effective rate is only slightly decreased (from 3 to 2, or 5 to 4, or 8 to 7, if I remember the repair rates correctly).
Your Last point is perfect. If you use both repair bays in one turn, they're both destroyed.
But, if you only use one, it gets repaired by the second, which gets destroyed, and then repaired by the first, which gets destroyed, etc., and you basically have two repair bays repairing each other each turn, until you take more damage. Which is the only way you could have the scenario you first described, where the undamaged repair bay repairs the damaged repair bay plus 2-7 components (depending on the repair bay) each turn until the ship is repaired. So the workaround would be:
1) build a ship with two repair bays
2) create a minor upgrade that replaces a single component
3) order a retrofit for your repair ship
4) move it into a sector with no other ship or planet able to repair it
5) let the repair bays work overtime!
BTW - if we're going to do this with repair bays, why not with ship-based space yards? How are they so different? Maybe the same mechanism that keeps ship-based space yards supplied is the same mechanism that keeps repair bays supplied. And the same mechanism that supplies planetary space yards in distant systems without local resource generation.