Repair

A question has arisen over combat repair, with John arguing for an approach under which anything damaged in combat would be checked on arrival at the next dockyard, and either
a) be given a swift kick and magically spring into life (50% of the time) or
b) cause your docky to suck in his breath sharply and say "that gonna have ta come aht, gov." (the other 50% of the time)
This would include stuff which you didn't manage to do a combat repair on.

From my perspective, if this is what people want, I'd just as soon drop the whole idea of repair, because it's the thin end of the wedge - next thing would be people arguing that combat repair should give you a plus on the dice roll, and then someone else would say a six should automatically make the part clone itself.

More rigorously, the economic model we started from BEGAN with the idea of repairing everything at full cost, and I then worked out the available money to make that possible, but tricky. So halving the cost of repair makes a mess of that idea. It also benefits big ships more than small ships, and one of the original design aims was to give us battles with smaller ships rather than fleets of big over the top megalomobiles.

My own argument on the followthrough to combat repair started from the supposition that it's only possible at all when the system isn't that badly banged up, in which case patching it up properly at the dockyard might involve less than a full replacement. So as I originally wrote the rule, there was a spectrum of results, from no charge up to about 75%. This was then simplified to the current all or nothing approach, which averages out at 50%. In essence it was a bit of a bonus for combat repair which I thought wouldn't do too much damage to the economics of the campaign, since combat repair's not that commonly successful.

While I'm here, a simple piece of news on repair costs; the repair costs of core systems were never made clear; it's one third of the cost of the keel of the ship, in the unlikely event that you ever find yourself in the position of repairing one.