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[Hiruma Kai]

Currently, the combat readiness mechanic (CR) has some non-intuitive effects.  Normally, having a low % CR reduction per deployment is a good thing, representing a rugged and reliable ship that is easy to maintain.  It means you can deploy more times consecutively.  However, this benefit gets turned into a disadvantage when a ship is destroyed.  By going directly to 0% CR, you essentially empty out the "supplies tank" of CR that you have stored.

If a ship loses 10% CR per deployment, and spend 4 supplies to restore that much, their CR tank effectively holds 40 supplies.  A ships that loses 20% CR per deployment and spend 4 supplies to restore that much has a CR tank that effectively hold 20 supplies.  Destruction hurts the 40 supply stored in CR ship more than the 20 supply stored in CR ship.  It also means that skills that increase maximum CR increase the amount of effective supplies stored in the CR tank, making it a disadvantage when destroyed.

A similar issue crops up with hull restoration.  If you have a high percent recovery rate of CR per day, such that it only take you 1.25 days to restore one deployment's worth of  CR, you'll be paying 80% of your deployment cost per day of hull repairs, even if your CR is at full.  If you have a low percent recovery rate of CR per day, such that it takes you 2 days to restore your CR, you'll be paying 50% of your deployment cost per day of hull repairs.  On a per deployment point basis, low tech ships are more expensive to repair than high tech ships - despite being expected to take more hull and armor damage even in successful fights.

A damaged Onslaught pays 10 supplies per day when restoring hull and armor.  An Odyssey pays 9 supplies per day to restore hull and armor, despite having a deployment cost 5 bigger.

So what if instead of having the penalty of having a hull transition from 1 to 0 be a dropping of CR to 0% no matter what it was, to be only dropping by one additional deployment's worth?  Mechanically, hull and CR are tracking two different things, otherwise being at 1% Hull and 90% Cr wouldn't make much sense.  This change makes the penalty proportional to deployment points directly, as opposed to also dependent on stats which are supposed to be beneficial, not harmful.

This eliminates the excessive penalty applied to ships are supposed to be rugged and easy to run, and puts them on the same playing field as other ships in their class, given the already flat time across class to restore hull from 0%.

One could also imagine having a repair cost per day separate from CR cost restoration per day, and using the higher value of either when both hull is damaged and CR is down.  So instead of paying 80% of the deployment cost per day when it takes 1.25 days to restore one deployment's worth of CR, it could be separated out to be, say, 50% of the deployment cost per day.  You spend 80% if you are doing both or just restoring CR, and 50% when just repairing.  Admittedly, this adds an additonal statistic, but it would be pretty straight forward to understand and does provide a meaningful mechanics difference.

The thing I like about this idea is it in fact makes it possible to have a ship be both easy to run and easy to repair, which is currently not possible due to how the various CR and restoration stats are linked.  Field repairs could change to have recovered ships restore their CR per deployment value, instead of the current minimum of 30-40%.

[Thaago]

I support separating these out into different stats - its a case where having the stats be derived from a common base is no longer simplifying, but making a lot of weird edge cases and counter-intuitive behaviors (as Hiruma Kai illustrated).

[SCC]

I wouldn't call the entirety of low-tech "a weird edge case".
This also applies to running out of PPT. All ships lose CR at the same rate, 1% every 4 seconds, even though different ships need more supplies to regain that 1% of CR.

[Hiruma Kai]

This also applies to running out of PPT. All ships lose CR at the same rate, 1% every 4 seconds, even though different ships need more supplies to regain that 1% of CR.

The supplies after PPT burn down doesn't bother me quite as much, if only because PPT is in fact an independent statistic, and traditionally low percent CR per deployment ships tend to have higher PPT.  Altering CR tick down rate would have significant affects on combat, at least for SO ships.  We could take a look at it though.

If we imagine CR to be a tank of supplies, where a 100% CR Lasher has a 40 supply tank, and a 100% Hyperion has a 37.5 supply tank.
For a Lasher to have a 1% tick down per 4 second, would imply 0.4 supplies every 4 seconds.  So, we'll call it effective deployment points/10, since we should include the effects of d-mods in there.  They essentially make the tank smaller, so to have the same tick down, the rate should also be affected by d-mods.  So in comparison, the Hyperion would tick down 1.5 supplies every 4 seconds.  So to go from 100% to 40% on the Lasher would take 240 seconds.  The Hyperion on the other hand, would only take 100 seconds (37.5*0.6/1.5)*4 seconds = 60 seconds, which would be a huge nerf to SO Hyperion builds, essentially dropping the usual CR degradation period to a quarter.

Current nominal combat time for an officered 100% CR SO Hyperion burning CR is 109 peak time + 426.7 CR burn time, for  535.7 seconds, or roughly 9 minutes.  With a change like this, it might end up being 109 peak + 106, or about 215 seconds, roughly 40% of the usable time.  That would completely push SO Hyperions out of the running in late game endurance battles, and non-SO Hyperions would be sitting at 436 seconds usable time. 

At that point, I'd probably bump base Hyperion PPT up to 180 seconds, having the So version hit 40% CR at the 256 second mark, almost exactly half current duration, while non-SO would hit 556, which is roughly current SO run time.

For a more typical 20% CR per deployment high tech ship, it'd drop the CR burn time base line to 120 seconds from 240 (or 213 instead of 426 seconds with skills/hardened subsystem).

That doesn't sound crazy actually.  Might be a way to make SO less attractive on high tech ships which typically benefit more from SO anyways.  At least in late game battles.  Early game, it'd probably be about the same effectiveness, which is maybe what you want.