Hi VO, been a while.

So I've been quietly tinkering around over the holidays and one small QoL feature I think might be appreciated is allowing your ship to self-repair up to a threshold (50%?) with scrap metal, a moderate repair-over-time that is disabled when you take further damage.

My reasoning;

Cargo holds are restrictive when botting. You can only take a small fraction of the loot back with you so there should be a reason for scrap metal to exist beyond the occasional mission collectathon.

Bulkier ships with larger holds have much less staying power than your average vulture; giving them an auto-repair makes use of their larger cargo holds.

Warping back to a station is Boring. Evading bots to pick up scrap for field repairs is risky and rewarding.

Potential counter-arguments;

'Not all ships are meant to kill bots (efficiently).' True, but the game should encourage experimentation and not have a single best option. Allowing a unit of scrap metal to gradually repair 10% armor only makes a difference if your ship can avoid being hit for enough time for it to kick in, so it's really for your Revenants and the like; we don't want to push players into the Vulture meta just yet.

'This could be abused in PvP.' Disable the capability when in combat with another player.

'Something something Prometheus something something.' This is a big problem, and why I think it should be restricted to certain ships. A big ship with a lot of armor and passable agility, combined with a modest cargo hold, could make this Very Very Annoying, so I'd suggest this only be rolled out for a few variants of certain ship types; the Revenant, Atlas, Raptor, Hornet and (maybe) Ragnarok.

'That makes it overly specific and complex.' Just add a field repair tag to these ships with a quick message from the voiceover to explain it; it's no more complicated than any other feature in the game.

'It might consume scrap at the wrong time.' Have a hotkey to enable/disable it.

That's all I can think of! Thoughts?