Damage Control - Question on how fast it repairs

[Crustypeanut (OP)]

Title pretty much says it all.   How fast can someone get damage control to work? Can it work within minutes? Essentially, I want to use it during combat, as my enemy uses Mesons, and I'm not going to be able to out range them, as I'm not using missiles.   My ship can easily field 200-300 damage control rating if needed, if that much speeds the process up.   It also has about 10,000 maintainence supplies.

The whole ship is still in it's design phase, but I'm just wondering, can it be used during combat reliably? Sort of a, self-regenerating ship, one might say.



Edit: Look a few posts down for me testing this out.   Can repair stuff within 5 seconds if you have enough DC.  I WILL HAVE SELF-REGENERATING SHIPS!

[hubgbf]

Hi,

It seems you are describing shields, not damage control.
Shields can recharge pretty fast with good tech, and will be more cost-effective than repair.

In addition, even without considering time, 10. 000 maintenance won't last long.  My last fight involve massive missile fire from ships 'armed' with AMM.  let's say 50 amm per 10 secondes on average.  Every amm can destroy a component, which would cost 20-1000 to repair, let's say 50 on average.  50*50=2500, your 10. 000 maintenances supply will last 4 salvos, i. e.  40 secondes.

[Crustypeanut (OP)]

No, actually I'm not talking about shields.  I'm talking about repairing the internal damage of my ship as its being done by Meson Cannon fire.  I know my cruisers are going to be taking massive amounts of fire, as they're the only ships in my fleet with active sensors.  Since the enemy is solely using Mesons, I want to find some kind of way to counter-act its damage.  Armor and Shields won't help me in this, so I turned to a third strategy - repairing it as I take it.

As for running out of maintenance supplies, that is certainly an issue, but I'm hoping my three cruisers each with 17,000+ supplies last long enough for my other ships to destroy the enemy, which last I've seen has about 50 Meson-armed FACs.  Each ship also has 252 Damage Control.

My main concern is how fast damage control can repair the damage done, not if its efficient or not.  I've already got my ships designed and being constructed, since it was taking a while to be answered, so I'm going to be testing this out like we do over on Bay12: Blind and Drunk.  

Edit: Here is the ship design, if anyone's curious about the craziness that this is.

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Jörmungandr class Fighter Cruiser    18,000 tons     1044 Crew     2584.6 BP      TCS 360  TH 660  EM 0
1833 km/s     Armour 5-61     Shields 0-0     Sensors 24/24/0/0     Damage Control Rating 252     PPV 0
Maint Life 14.81 Years     MSP 17077    AFR 216%    IFR 3%    1YR 146    5YR 2185    Max Repair 128 MSP
Hangar Deck Capacity 5000 tons    

Military Ion Engine E9.6 (10)    Power 66    Fuel Use 96%    Signature 66    Armour 0    Exp 10%
Fuel Capacity 550,000 Litres    Range 57.3 billion km   (361 days at full power)

Active Search Sensor MR102-R100 (1)     GPS 12800     Range 102.4m km    Resolution 100
Active Search Sensor MR10-R1 (1)     GPS 128     Range 10.2m km    Resolution 1
Thermal Sensor TH3-24 (1)     Sensitivity 24     Detect Sig Strength 1000:  24m km
EM Detection Sensor EM3-24 (1)     Sensitivity 24     Detect Sig Strength 1000:  24m km

This design is classed as a Military Vessel for maintenance purposes


[dgibso29]

If they are using Mesons, wouldn't your other ships be in their active sensor range anyway?

As for the DC, I don't know enough about it to tell you either way, sorry.

[Crustypeanut (OP)]

My other ships certainly will be in their range, but I figure they'll go after my ships with my active sensors first - aka, the three Cruisers.  My Destroyers are there to guard the cruisers at all costs, and if I lose a few of those, no biggy.

I'm almost done building the fleet.. so once I do, I'll see how this works. 

[Thiosk]

I really don't know the rate.  I've been on the impression that its more like hours to do repairs, and they tend to happen one at a time.  My only experience with it was a knock-down-drag-out against a team of 22 or so FACs, at which time I saw the next wave of cruisers coming, so hightailed the fleet out of there.  damaged ships were repairing engines to get their speed back up so the cruisers couldn't catch them-- about 3/4 of the damaged ships managed to get back to the jump point and limp home.  It was about a 1 day flight at max speed from the JP to the battle zone, and they only ticked off an item every few hours.

This was with a single install of either generation 1 or 2 damage control.

[Garfunkel]

You can only repair a single component at a time and it takes hours, not minutes.

[TheDeadlyShoe]

I think the best solution vs Mesons is probably to pump up your internal HTK with turret armor.   And redundant systems ofc.

On the plus side you can just strip all the armor and shields off designs that are intended to fight purely this enemy.   My last game I thought it was only armor that mesons went through. . .  my poor brave men and their useless shields

PS!!!

You can get 10 HTK out of a size 1 empty magazine. . .  Oo

That seems kind of broken, if the toughness of your ship scales with HTK, but i don't know if it does.   

[Brian Neumann]

Mesons have both good and bad points.  The good is obvious they bypass all your shields and armor.  The bad is that they only do 1 point of damage.  When they hit a system with a htk (hit to kill) of more than 1 then there is a chance the system will not be destroyed.  IIRC the chance is 1/htk so a 2 htk system has a 50% survival chance while a 5 htk system has a 80% chance to survive (20% chance of being destroyed 1/5).  So having a higher overall htk will help you survive the meson shots.  The problem of relying on this is that most of the fire control and sensor systems are 1 htk regardless of the size installation.  So once you start getting more than a few hits you will be losing your fire controls.  If you have multiple fire control that will work then you should be alright.  If however you only have 1 or 2 fire controls for your ship you may very well find yourself having lots of weapons and no way to target them.  In this case the damage control could help, but it would need to be extremely high to have much chance of repairing a system while in combat.  I think you will find that the extra space could be better used for a couple of redundant systems to back up your primary fire control.  I rarely find a need to have extra active sensors as each ship has at least short range res 1 sensors in my standard ship designs.  This pretty much disaster proofs a fleet against losing all of its active sensors while in beam combat, or defending against missile attack in final pd mode.

Brian

[Girlinhat]

Can't you apply manual damage and then record the rate?  Assume worst case, sensors and all engines taken out, activate your damage control, and start counting seconds.

[ZimRathbone]

My experience is that its roughly 1 repair every 3 hours, which reminds me of a bit of an exploit and a bug I noticed a few months ago.

If you use DC to repair a ship it will take a few days to completely repair most combat damage - if the same ship is repaired using shipyard facilities then it takes a number of weeks to fix up a similar level of damage.  Now I know that the DC repairs cost more in terms of Maintenance supplies, but I dont think this covers the magnitude of the savings in time, esp since the Maint Supplies only cost 0.125 x Duranium, 0.0625 Uridium & 0.0625 Gallicite each,  and the SY repairs use the minerals required to build the damaged component.

The bug is that if you repair all internal damage using DC, the ship then does not appear in the Ships Requiring Repair screen, even tho it still has outstanding armour damage (which cannot be repaired by DC)  I suspect that this is because armour is not a "damaged component" and damage there is recorded in a seperate table that provides that nice armour status screen.   The query behind the Damaged Ships report needs to ammended to include this table.

[hubgbf]

As meson are very short ranged weapon, why not only fleeing from them and pounce them with your amm or other missiles with low size sensibility's firecontrol?

I once encounter star swarn, a spoiler race and was able to detect them sooner enough with my specialized amm fire control and open fire on them, destroying them witout trouble with amm.

Are you trying to jump through a nest of meson armed ennemy? If yes try to make fast ships with a high range jump engine to jump out of ennemy meson range, and then pounce them with amm or other gun, just adapt your order to follow them to a range superior to their range but inferior to yours.

Better to outrange them than trying to survive their fire IMHO.

[Vanigo]

Title pretty much says it all.   How fast can someone get damage control to work? Can it work within minutes? Essentially, I want to use it during combat, as my enemy uses Mesons, and I'm not going to be able to out range them, as I'm not using missiles.

Are you sure you can't outrange them? If your range and top speed are both inferior to your enemy's, you just plain auto-lose. And if you're fighting FACs, your top speed isn't likely to be as good.

[Crustypeanut (OP)]

Hey guys, long time since I've posted here (honestly totally forgot about testing this), and now that I'm hooked on the game again, I came across this question and humorously found my own post.  

So I decided to try out Girlinhat's idea and apply manual damage and see how fast it repairs.

Found out that, with enough damage control, and depending on the item in question, the quickest I've seen is 30 seconds, that was a quad gauss cannon (8% accuracy one).  Applying damage control to damaged damage controls took between 2 and 10 minutes with about 190 damage control.  

Going to continue testing, but with enough DC (particularly on ships with the space), it might be viable to use in conjuction with internal armor.



Edit: Repaired a Nuclear Thermal Engine in 5 seconds, having 221 Damage Control.  Thats huge, Imo.  However, its also very variable - took a few minutes for another engine of the same type, same DC.  

[Crustypeanut (OP)]

Ok guys, in a few minutes I'm going to be doing more thorough testing, keeping track of how many modules (and what size they are) get repaired in an X-long time incriment.  It checks to see what module (if any) is repaired every 5 seconds, so its best not to skip intervals when doing emergency damage control during battle.

I will be applying manual damage to a relatively large ship that would be realistically designed in-game (At least by me).  Named the Wraith-class Battlecruiser.

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Wraith class Battlecruiser    60,000 tons     4508 Crew     11613.2 BP      TCS 1200  TH 5600  EM 0
4666 km/s     Armour 15-136     Shields 0-0     Sensors 1/1/0/0     Damage Control Rating 500     PPV 134.92
Maint Life 8.27 Years     MSP 32419    AFR 1440%    IFR 20%    1YR 843    5YR 12650    Max Repair 288 MSP
Magazine 2768    

Magneto-plasma Drive E6 (70)    Power 80    Fuel Use 60%    Signature 80    Armour 0    Exp 5%
Fuel Capacity 2,400,000 Litres    Range 120.0 billion km   (297 days at full power)

Quad 10cm C5 Far Ultraviolet Laser Turret (4x4)    Range 150,000km     TS: 10000 km/s     Power 12-20     RM 5    ROF 5        3 3 3 3 3 2 2 1 1 1
Fire Control S08 192-10000 (4)    Max Range: 384,000 km   TS: 10000 km/s     97 95 92 90 87 84 82 79 77 74
Stellarator Fusion Reactor Technology PB-1 (4)     Total Power Output 48    Armour 0    Exp 5%

Size 8 Missile Launcher (10)    Missile Size 8    Rate of Fire 50
Missile Fire Control FC332-R200 (2)     Range 332.6m km    Resolution 200
Size 8 Anti-ship Missile (226)  Speed: 30,000 km/s   End: 57.3m    Range: 103.1m km   WH: 9    Size: 8    TH: 180 / 108 / 54

Active Search Sensor MR98-R70 (1)     GPS 5880     Range 98.4m km    Resolution 70
Active Search Sensor MR678-R300 (1)     GPS 84000     Range 679.0m km    Resolution 300

Missile to hit chances are vs targets moving at 3000 km/s, 5000 km/s and 10,000 km/s

This design is classed as a Military Vessel for maintenance purposes

Not the most ideal ship out there, but works for our purposes as she has a mixture of engines, active sensors, and missile and beam fire controls, all of which are important.

Momentarily I'll be posting screenshots of the first Wraith after she's taken some damage and we'll see how long it takes for her to regen.

Here is the total damage of the BC Absolution:

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3x Fuel Storage (20)
5x Magneto-Plasma Drive E6 (80)
6x Maintenance Storage Bay (30)
2x Size 8 Missile Launcher (128)
1x Advanced Damage Control (150)
1x Quad 10cm C% Far Ultraviolet Laser (Not sure, it runs off)
1x Fire Control S08 192-10000 (576)
2x Capacity 96 Magazine: EXp 10% HT (Can't see the rest)

Damage Control will begin on 1st January 2025 00:00.
I will end it at 00:05, aka 5 minutes.  It currently has 470 Damage Control.  It will have 500 once the Advanced DC is repaired (First on the list)

- Unsurprisingly, it the more that number on the end is, the longer it takes.  It took 1 minute 25 seconds to repair the damage control, and another 3 minutes 45 seconds for the Missile Fire Control.  So, for big things, you need A LOT of damage control to repair it quickly.  Only two items were repaired in 5 minutes and 10 seconds.  Now that the big things are out of the way, lets see how long it takes.

- It took 3 minutes 40 seconds to repair one missile launcher, which is odd because its rating is only 128 vs the fire control's 500+.  For the second missile launcher (Same size), it took 7 minutes and 15 seconds.

- After the second damage missile launcher was done, it took only 20 seconds to repair an engine.  Then it decided to take 2 minutes and 15 seconds for another engine of the same type, followed by a 3rd at 1 minute 55 seconds and a 4th at 50 seconds.  The final 5th one took 4 minutes and 45 seconds.

-The quad turret took 5 minutes and 45 seconds to repair.  The first of two magazines took 5 seconds to repair after that.  The second one took 1 minutes 25 seconds.

-From here on out its maintenance storage bays and fuel tanks.  The first Storage bay took 30 seconds.  The next two took 5 seconds each.  Fourth one took 1 minute and 35 seconds.  The fifth one took 25 seconds while the final 6th one took 15 seconds.

-Of the final three items (all fuel tanks), the first two took 5 seconds each while the 3rd took 45 seconds.

As you can see, my initial findings last post were not quite as accurate.. apparently, the higher tech something is, the more damage control it requires to repair quicker.  I had the low-tech engines repairing within 5-20 seconds constantly, while these higher-tech ones took longer with the same DC.  So, apparently having stupid-high DC is required the more tech you have.  Even then, it seems variable.. and I'm not sure how exactly it calculates when something gets repaired.

In all, it took 37 minutes and 10 seconds to completely repair the ship (Minus armor of course).  Thats not bad, its just not useful in the heat of combat. 

Steve, if you can shed any light on how DC actually works, that would be awesome.  I, for one, would love to have regenerating ships that just say 'screw you' to internal damage (if combined with internal armor).  Only issue with a self-regenerating ship would be of course maintenance supplies and the loss of crew when something gets blown up.  Might run out of crew..