Pro Tip: Use the Spanner to Repair

From title alone you may think i'm trolling but hear me out.



The mallet and pipe wrench repair more damage per hit so they are usually better for repairing, especially when an engineer is managing several components at once. In exchange for this increased repair per hit, wrenchs and mallets have a longer cooldowns.



For example a mallet can repair 250 hp per hit, but has a 9 second cooldown.

a wrench can repair 120 hp per hit, but has a 5 second cooldown.





A spanner on the other hand repairs only a measly 40 hp but only has a 2 second cooldown.



This means that spanners are bad at repairing large amounts of damage quickly, but they good at repairing small amounts of damage being dealt periodically.



Using a mallet or wrench when only mild amounts of damage have been dealt can be very dangerous.

For example: If a crewmember mallets a ships hull armor when its only been mildly damaged the crew must wait a full 9 seconds before they can repair the armor again. 9 seconds during which the enemy can bring down the ship's hull armor while the engineers can do nothing to stop it. Using a spanner however lowers that window to 2 seconds, and if larger repairs are needed the crew only needs to wait 2 seconds to use another tool.





My favorite use of this technique is keeping up engines while a captain uses a pilot tool. So long as nothing else is being damaged, An Engineer can hop from engine to engine with their spanner. Topping off each engine before it takes more than 40 hp points of pilot tool damage. Once the pilot is done using the tool the engie can quickly get of the engines since they only have to wait 2 seconds or less for each engine.



Another application is to finish repairing slightly damaged parts, particualarly under fire.If the part is only midly damaged it can be hit it with the spanner to top it off. If it gets damaged again the quick cooldown allows the engineer to hit it with another tool quickly after more damage is done or merely use the spanner again if the damage is slight enough.



Once again. If the part is damaged by more than 80 hp points or the engineer doesn't have the time to hover around the component using the spanner to repair is a bad idea. But if a component is taking mild amounts of damage periodically, and/or the enginerr has time to watch it, the spanner may be the best tool to use.







