Most capital ships should repair themselves (without having to dock at a station).

In 1.9 Beta 4 I added standard repair for the following capital ships:

SHIP                 REGEN   NOTES
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Drake-class          -       Too small for damage control
Salvager Nomad       1.4
Charon frigate       -       Relies on stations
Urak destroyer       2.3
Earth Slaver         3
Tripoli-class        3
Troglav-class        3
Xenophobe defender   3
Hurin-class          3.5
Lumiere destroyer    3.5
Svalbard-class       4
Ventari destroyer    4
Xenophobe worldship  4
Cometfall-class      4.5
Deimos-class         4.5
Eir-class            4.5
Excruciator-class    4.5
Gaian processor      4.5
Ranx dreadnought     5
Svarog-class         4.5
Xenophobe ark        4.5
Aquila-class         4.5
CSC                  10
Dragon Slaver        -       Not designed for long-duration
Huygens-class        -       No crew
Phobos-class         8
Iocrym command ship  -       Relies on stations

In Eternity Port I added repair to the following capital ships:

SHIP                 REGEN   NOTES
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Goron monitor        -       Zoanthrope
Mammoth frigate      2.3
Goron behemoth       -       Zoanthrope
Maasai-class         3.5
Imperator-class      3.5
Khurasan-class       4.5
Revenant-class       4
Yamato-class         -       Not designed for long-duration
Alexei Leonov-class  4.5
Dreaming nomad       4.5
Sentoku-class        4.5
derakon 22 Jan 2021:

Note that the Huari are kind of maddening to fight precisely because they constantly restore their shield HP, which makes their ships very difficult to take down. This is fine for an allied faction but I wouldn't recommend that kind of fast recovery for enemy ships. So, two suggestions: limit the rate of healing to something that's not particularly useful in the middle of combat, and prevent them from recovering internal HP this way.

assumedpseudonym 22 Jan 2021:

 …I feel a bit less bad about having preemptively added damage control parties (or an equivalent thereto) to most of TSB’s capships now…

george moromisato 22 Jan 2021:

@derakon: Agreed that this should not affect combat. I'm thinking a low rate. Or even something that only regens outside of combat.

The issue is with wandering ships (like Xenophobes) which take a bit of damage here and there. The longer you wait, the weaker they get.

digarw 22 Jan 2021:

I like this idea. It would make sense because large capital ship could hold hundreds people and there should be some group that able to control damage within the ship hull. Unfortunately, enemy capital ships may become too powerful for player, especially when player unable to defeat them on first try. I think the capital ship only regenerate when outside of combat. Probably by detecting if there any projectile in their surrounding or perhaps by human casualty on the capital ship. More damaged they are, more slower they regenerate.

kourtious 22 Jan 2021:

@derakon
Huari ships are more the exception than the rule. There just needs to be a set cooldown between repairing shields.

@digarw
I agree that Capital Ships should repair significantly out of combat faster. This makes sense thematically at least for human ships. Exceptions can be made for something like Chimeras.

In naval combat, the captain must decide whether the ship is repairable or to be abandoned. The tipping of that decision should represent the capital repair system. Essentially once the player deals a significant enough damage, capital ships cannot repair unless they are out of combat. However, while in combat repair should always be less than out of combat.

Here are the example scenarios for simplification:
No combat - +10% hull repair every minute, fast module repairs
In combat - +2% hull repair every minute, medium module repairs (combat oriented focus like shields and weapons)
Catastrophic Damage - 0% hull repair every minute, spare module repairs (aka get life support/auxiliary engines going)

Of course, something like a Chimera would probably repair at all levels evenly.

@George
On the contrary, Xenophobes should have amazing damage control capabilities and should not weaken significantly the more damage they get. After all, they are warrior nomads that live and die by the ship. If the ships get messed up after a single fight, the attrition and replacement of ships must be really high. I can only see that for fighters.

megas 22 Jan 2021:

It would be nice to be able to repair hull, especially if such a capital ship is the playership. No fun having such a ship permanently scarred with no way to fix it. Keep it simple. After all, player can repair armor instantly by chugging armor kits and the like.

george moromisato 22 Jan 2021:

@kourtious: Agree on Xenophobes. I was talking about how Xenophobes work today; that's why I want to add damage control parties.

assumedpseudonym 24 Jan 2021:

 Speaking from the experience I’ve had with the scripted damage control I coded into TBR (and which Aury adapted for TSB and Song borrowed for ES), there’s no real need to make repair rate scale inversely to hull damage. It’s already going to be slow enough that it won’t meaningfully contribute to a single encounter, in much the same way that station repairs have negligible impact on most fights against them.

 The version I use also disables damaged weapons (to avoid self-damaging) while having a chance of repairing and re-enabling damaged equipment (mostly (but not exclusively) weapons) if hull integrity is above seventy-five percent, with all devices being fully repaired once hull integrity is maxed out. I haven’t had any issues with this in practice; most fights, hull integrity is going down much faster than it can be repaired, so there’s no significant per-engagement impact there, either.

 Mostly, neither hull nor device repairs do anything to affect immediate gameplay, the only time they come into play are in the long term — making, for example, a CSC survive multiple encounters instead of slowly getting pinged to death by repeated waves of Sandstorms when one of them lands a lucky shot to knock out a Katana.

 Boss, if you want to decompile TBR and use my take on damage control for inspiration, feel free; the lambda is defined in TheBackroadsLibrary.xml and called from capships defined in TBRShips.xml (both in TheBackroadsLibrary.TDB).