I think its a little silly being able to repair your ship in the time it takes to click a button. Making it take time to me makes sense because it stops people from getting to 10% docking and coming out at full 2 seconds later and for the realism.

A set time per % or per hull should be set imo.

1min 30 seconds to fully heal a valk is about what I was thinking.

Good call. I like this idea. If you want to keep fighting, you gotta buy two ships. It'll cut down on the valk usage at least. But might I also recommend that it remain instantaneous in home sectors? I wouldn't want to frustrate the already frustrated newbies while they're botting.

The repair rate should also vary by ship type. Heavy ships are more prone to take damage, and lots of it before they get to the docks. They should probably repair at a faster rate than a fighter. Maybe it should just be inversely proportional to mass.

This is an excellent idea!!! I hate it when I fight two people, one runs, and is back in the fight before I can get back to base.

Developed idea: Allow widgets/upgrades that increase repair time. Perhaps a weapon that causes a peculiar type of damage that takes a long time repair, or perhaps can't be repaired at all.

For a standard rate, I'm thinking 100 armor per second.

Yes, we were discussing this in game and decided between 1 and 3 seconds per % point would be fair. Or maybe varying, heavy damage takes longer at first but then speeds up as it gets better...

I'm not a big fan of that. Although it may be realistic, as a game 'feature' it is a big 'no no' to force players to do nothing but wait. Besides, people would get around it by keeping several ships in a station and just switching ships.

Better I think to force repairs to cost something (like they used to).

Better still is to have it cost some percentage of the hull cost. So if a Valk is 50% damaged, repairing it ought to cost (as an easy example) 25% of the Valk hull's purchase price. Repairing the free ship can remain free, since otherwise people would just buy a new free ship (for free).

It won't 'balance' things by any means, but it is certainly 'fair'.

Eventually, the whole 'duck back into the base thing' would be best solved by RP/reputation enforcement. For example, if you pick a fight (try to 'pirate') in a sector, that sector's station might lock you out and prevent you from docking/impose fines/send its police bots out to arrest/destroy you, etc.

People will get around it by having multiple ships, but that increases the expenses of greifing. Besides which, a special ship would have to sit in the dock and repair much more frequently, thereby spending a lot of time there unless the fighter is good. My only concern is that heavy ships may be unfairly penalized for being too slow to effectively dodge. If it was set up so that heavy ships repair faster than fighters though, the poor prometheus would have nothing to fear.

"well cost hurts newbies more then it would vets or griefers"

Well, so does delay, since as I pointed out the easiest way around this is to own multiple ships.

"Even if it only took 30 seconds to repair the ship to 100% it would be better then now."

I'm not in the slightest convinced it would change 'griefer' behavior in the slightest. The real problem is that its easy to ambush someone then run away if things don't go well, and there are no consequences to doing so.

well cost hurts newbies more then it would vets or griefers.

Taking too much time is very very bad I agree. But instant fix is not that good either.

Even if it only took 30 seconds to repair the ship to 100% it would be better then now.

it would not change their behaviour at all. But it would stop them from running to the dock and repairing and then undocking b4 a slow trader (centaur) could even dock once, or escape the area. At the moment I can dock the valk repair and still catch a trader in a centaur.

A way to make it so the hvy armored ships get out as fast is make it on % instead of numbers. 1% per second or 3% a second or whatever.

And I see no problem with doing both of these things really. Paying for ship repair and it taking time could work well together.

I am concerned about newbies being turned off because of making expensive repairs though.