I'm praying for some way to repair the ship while inflight, but I agree it wouldn't be very realistic. So I think a good alternative would be to have the possibility to add shields to ships, that recharge (and reduce the charging rate of the battery) in addition to armor. This way it's a realistic repair system. Like the powercell, making it a replaceable, improvable element sounds nice to me. Does it to you, too ?

There is a way to repair the ship inflight. You'll see when you get to level 2/-/2/-

edit: yes, goatwarrior you can't repair yourself, only others, but this encourages grouping.

You mean the repair gun? Does that only repair other ships and not yourself?

A shield that recharges off your battery, might be a hinderance rather than a help. Your turbo and energy weapons all use your battery... If you get caught in a situation that you'd want to flee, the shield would probably prevent you from making a proper escape. IE... you turn to run, you start getting hit... your shield is almost depleted... you hit turbo and get out of fire, BUT your shield now begins to recharge... stealing vital energy from your turbo.

Your quick retreat is now a slow death inviting crawl. And while I'm sure you can turn it on and off, in that situation you'd probably not have enough time to. Besides... Do you really want that uber Pirate to have access to that too???? :P

Ah, but the turbo-vs-shields battery problem is a choice, not instant doom, as long as shields are optional; you can always choose to not use shields and have turbo available more often. Of course, it'd also not be too unreasonable to have two battery ports on a ship, and allow assigning of energy-using items to each battery distinctly... So you could choose to run your shields and guns off one battery, and your turbo and warp drive off another... Or your shields off one, and everything else off the other...