[QuarianRex]

On the OA thing:

I wound up reading up on the OA ability, after I made that post, and it seems that regeneration works a little different than I had originally thought. It seems that each regen component adds to a regen 'pool' that is later used to repair OA components after they've been destroyed. Also, the OA components stop adding to the pool when they first get destroyed.

This explains OA's somewhat eratic performance in combat, as it initially seems capable of coming back from nearly anything (a ship with 5 OA III that spends 5 turns closing with the enemy would build up a regen pool of 30x5x5 turns=750, enough to repair all 5 OA's after initial destruction), yet seems to be ineffective later in combat [the pool has been used up/no (or few) components being capable ofadding to it] or during close engagements like at a warp point (no time to build up a regen pool). I tried it out and this explaination seems pretty accurate. And the chance to repair components at the end of combat may just be the final redistribution of the regen pool for turn 30.

This revelation came to me courtesy of one of the contributors (Zircher perhaps?) to the Dubious strategy guide, a rather helpful, though massive (400+ pages), tome.

Also, my principle objection arose because it sounded like OA was going to be added to every component, thereby ruining the more interesting aspects of Vorlon or Shadow Tech (regeneration isn't so fearsome if everyone has it). That and scaling everything up by a factor of ten (ouch).