Repairing Space Stations?

[Destragon (OP)]

I hadn't really thought about this before, but the new spoiler race has made it more of a concern and someone on the Discord brought it up today.

What if you have a damaged, huge space station, much bigger than any of your shipyards or repairyards and it doesn't have enough MSP storage to self-repair?
Is there any way you can repair the space station without going into SM and giving the design extra MSP storage?
Should there maybe be a way for maintenance ships/installations to repair components on a space station?

[nuclearslurpee]

Build a bigger shipyard, tug the station to the shipyard, repair, profit.

I think you would also have the option to use hangar bays to conduct the repair, but if you can build a big enough hangar bay you have a big enough shipyard.

[TallTroll]

You'd only need enough MSP storage to repair the largest individual item, and keep reloading it as necessary. The max repair value probably isn't going to be that big, because you don't have engines to deal with, which are often the main culprit, and you probably don't have to worry about weapons, because huge stations are usually commercial

[Destragon (OP)]

Build a bigger shipyard, tug the station to the shipyard, repair, profit.

I think you would also have the option to use hangar bays to conduct the repair, but if you can build a big enough hangar bay you have a big enough shipyard.

I guess you could build a huge commercial hangar space station for repairs, but then you'd need to build an even bigger one when you wanna repair that one haha.

You'd only need enough MSP storage to repair the largest individual item, and keep reloading it as necessary. The max repair value probably isn't going to be that big, because you don't have engines to deal with, which are often the main culprit, and you probably don't have to worry about weapons, because huge stations are usually commercial

Gotta keep in mind that you'd need DOUBLE the MSP though, because it's battle damage. So for a terraforming station that would be 1000 MSP.

It would be kinda cool though, since space stations are kinda modular in real life, if we could just temporarily attach a maintenance storage module to the station to let it repair or something like that.

[mike2R]

One way it could be implemented would be to allow ships to use MSP capacity from an attached Tug.  We could then have repair ships that can latch onto things that can't otherwise repair themselves.  Might be useful for other ships, as well as stations, now we've got pirates that are likely to cause damage to commercial ships that don't have the capacity to repair battle damage.

[TallTroll]

>> Gotta keep in mind that you'd need DOUBLE the MSP though, because it's battle damage.

Hmmm, good point, I had forgotten that. What about permitting ships to use MSPs in cargo? It seems unlikely anyone is going to go adding cargo holds to military ships anytime soon, except for very occasional military engined fast transports. I do sometimes build these in really spread out empires, because sometimes being able to move critical minerals or even more rarely infrastructure/facilities a long way, quickly is worth it. It can be very irritating if your only good source of Gallicite, say is several jumps one side of Sol, and your main Shipyards are the other, closer to the front with the unpleasant neighbours. A few thousand tons of whatever to keep building and repairs going delivered in a few weeks is worth more than an entire cargo fleets worth a year from now, when everything has been wrecked because you couldn't keep your industry going. even so, I doubt I've ever built them in even half the games I've ever played, they really are terribly inefficient