Repairbot PAR0 and PAR1

[sgqwonkian]

I can't seem to find anything that documents what PAR0 and PAR1 do in repair bots.

I'm guessing PAR1 is how much damage it heals, on the same scale / timeframe as the damage beam weapons do.

I can think of several possibilities for PAR0:

• Percent of hull damage it can repair you back to, and/or the % of damage you must take before it kicks in.
• Percent of system damage it can repair.
• Percent of healing it puts on hull, as opposed to systems.
• Time delay (after damage is inflicted) before it starts repairing.
• Time it takes to restore a damaged sy_ system from gray to green.
• Time it takes to restore a damaged sy_ system one level of color-coded improvement.

Some of the possibilities would be hard to eliminate with casual observation.

Has anyone on here fiddled with repair systems enough to figure it out?

[sgqwonkian]

Played around with it a lot and came to some startling conclusions:

About PAR0:

• PAR0 seems very likely to be the number of hundredths of a second it takes for the repair system to restore a damaged shield.
• So if PAR0 is set to 100, it repairs a system in 1 second.
• When I set PAR0 to be 1, it resulted in my systems briefly flashing red or yellow when I was damaged, and then instantly returning to green.

About PAR1:

• PAR1 doesn't seem to do much. I tried it with values of 1, 3, 9, and 100, and couldn't really see a difference.
• There's a small possibility that it's how many systems it can repair at once. That would result in 9 and 100 looking functionally the same, since no ship I tried it on had more than 9 systems.
• Definitely PAR1 has nothing to do with actually repairing your hulls. If it did, then setting it to 100 should have been really noticeable.

[sgqwonkian]

Tested some more stuff out. Setting your repair bot to PAR0 @500, and PAR1 @ 100 makes you almost invulnerable. My science vessel with a cone cannon killed 6 urluquai fighters and a deep hunter, without losing anything beyond his shields. Then he faced down a tchorak ship, and I died when I rammed the tchorak. The tchorak was at a sliver of his health when I blew up. Go science vessel!

I now think my original number analysis was terribly wrong. I'm going to do a lot more tests to figure it out for certain.

[sgqwonkian]

After several more tests with a variety of values, I am now 98% certain of the following facts concerning Repairbot stats:

• PAR0 is how many points of damage it heals.
  
• PAR1 is how many times per second it heals the amount of damage listed in PAR0.

I'm a little less certain of the following (but still 70%+ confident)...

• It seems that whenever the healing triggers, it heals not only hull but also systems damage. So a high PAR1 but low PAR0 results in a ship whose hull hardly repairs at all, but whose systems are restored frequently. That implies that ship's systems have a small number of hitpoints.

[sgqwonkian]

I'm really beginning to regret that this forum doesn't let you edit anything beyond the first post in a thread.

It would appear my "98% certain" ideas were 100% wrong.

I just tried an item with these parameters:

PAR0 20
PAR1 20

If my theories had been correct, it would have healed 20 damage, 20 times per second. 400 damage total, so 33% faster than the multibot repair drone. Instead, it repaired really slowly in battle.

After the fight, I went to fix my ship the manual "hard way". I was amazed to discover that my hull, which was about 2/3rds red, repaired in one day.

I now suspect that PAR0 is the only thing that affects damage repaired during combat. It may be that PAR1 reduces repair time after combat. A 20 in PAR1 is more than 6 times as high as anything in the main game, but a 20 in PAR0 is very low.

Seeing as how I've been prone to confirmation bias as I experiment with repairbots, this should all be taken with a grain of salt. I could be wrong again. I'll test it a bunch more before making a Tech Transparency 2.2.

Even if my new observations are correct, and PAR0 alone determines repairs during combat, I don't know if PAR0 is expressed in hull points, or as a percentage. Lots more tests to follow.

[sgqwonkian]

Cool test results, shedding new light on the mystery...

I had previously made a repair item with the stats:
PAR0 20
PAR1 2
thinking it would repair a little slower than the hyperfoam injector (which has PAR0 50 PAR1 1), since 20 x 2 = 40.

I just did some tests with it. In combat, it seems to perform much slower than the injector. I'm not sure if that's 20% slower (40 rating) or 60% slower (20 rating), it would take more tests to establish that for certain, and it's all pretty anecdotal.

The interesting part is that out of combat, the ship info screen said it would take me 5 days to repair my hull. Instead of repairing, I removed the item and stuck it in my cargo bay. Suddenly the repair time jumped to 15 days. I swapped the item back in, but the repair time stayed at 15 days. At that point I repaired my hull.

At the next star, I met the klakar, and bought a hyperfoam injector. I plugged it in instead of the item I'd made, and went to pick a fight somewhere.

At the end of that fight, it said my hull repairs would take 3 days. I swapped out the injector for the item I'd made, and the repair time switched to 2 days. I pulled the new item out, and the repairs switched to 7 days. I put the injector back in, and nothing happened. I clicked / picked up my new item again, and before I could drop it into my ship, the repair time switched back to 3 days. I swapped them around some more to figure out what was happening.

So, here's the conclusions I'm drawing:

• PAR1 definitely affects repair time after combat. It appears that the new repair time is (Normal Repair Time)/1+(PAR1).
  
• When you swap around repair units, they impact your out-of-combat repair time, however the screen doesn't immediately refresh.
  • If you downgrade your repair abilities, it usually refreshes immediately.
  • If you upgrade your repair abilities, however, it seems to not refresh until you pick something else up.
  • Not sure if that's a feature or a bug.