[Erax]

Your repair crew is the absolute minimum number of people required to keep everything running. If you take on a big job like a retrofit, you hire more people or pull them off other projects. And your industry has to build the spare parts, which could have been used on a brand new ship, etc. etc. (I don't think you'd keep a spare ion engine just lying around, if you need something big like that you build it).

Regarding RT combat, I wish Malfador would go the X-Com Apocalypse way and give us both options : regular turn-based tactical or real-time tactical combat.