[Suicide Junkie]

In general, you'll want to spam a few tens of repair drones into space to do your repairs.

The maintenance yards are nice for when you want to do either minor or long-term retrofits without having to keep building and launching drones.

For intermediate or volume repairs, drones are definitely the way to go. Just toss 50 or 100 up there, and you can grind through the heavy damage.

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PS:
Check your abilities tab to see what your racial modifiers are for repair.
Unless your repair modifier is below 50%, two repair points per sector will be enough to get you started.
Below 50, just spam drones up there and forget about maintenance yards.

Setting your repair skill to 3 or 4 HUNDRED % makes the maintenance yards quite effective.