Hull Restoration feels like cheating. Pick this skill, and your ships will magically fix their severe, overhaul-requiring problems mid-flight. Also pretty much all of them will be recoverable as long as you win a fight.
IMO this skill should be toned down somewhat. Right now you'd be a complete idiot not to pick it, which basically makes the Industry skills "mandatory".
Hull Restoration should instead give you a discount on in-dock overhauls to remove d-mods, plus the ship recovery rate should be reduced.
Inb4 "just don't pick it bro": if a skill is officially part of the game, I will pick it. I am not a Catholic nun to exercise self-restraint while playing Starsector. Not picking Hull Restoration also doesn't make sense from a roleplay perspective. What captain would be stupid enough to pass on the "magic ship repair" option?
I disagree - for me hull restoration is a "never" pick unless I'm going for serious Automated Ship deployments. I consider it the weakest capstone by a significant margin.
Hull restoration is a QoL boost... but its a QoL boost for something that is low priority and easy. Having a few D mods on ships is fine: the psychological need to have 'perfect' ships is more impactful than 1 or 2 D mods. Once the ship has too many (say 4 or 5) it can be scrapped and a new one bought (or it could be restored, though that is expensive). In that way Hull Restoration provides a decent economic boost, but not a very large ones. Ships are cheap and plentiful compared to combat rewards. If the player snags a high/very high importance contact on a good planet, even capital ships are cheap (contact ships are something like 25% of the regular price I think).
Consider for example losing a destroyer, say an escort sunder, in a fight. A new Sunder costs about 50k (you get the weapons back from recovering, stripping, scrapping, along with some fuel/supplies), but it doesn't need a replacement after a single loss because a few D mods isn't a big deal. So say 3 explosions average before needing a new one, or ~16k credits per pop. That's really not very much, and in most combats a player won't lose very many ships. Even a hard fight with losses is still profitable as bounty payments are generous (especially contact bounties!).
Losing a capital is painful as they are much more expensive - the same metric of 3 losses before replacement gives 100-300k per explosion, a nasty amount! But it should only be in the most dire fights that capitals are lost (IE a fight where the player should have issued retreat orders to run before it got to that point). That's one of the reasons to
have smaller ships, so that they sacrifice themselves before capitals die.
One argument against the above is that the S mods on the ships are lost when they are replaced... but they aren't because the remaining "balance" of bonus XP from the S mods is given when the ship is lost/scrapped. The lifecycle bonus XP of scrapping a ship, buying a new one, and putting the S mods back on is 100% for each S mod.
15% CR for all pristine ships is nice. It frees up an officer skill for normal ships (though CR and potentially hull regen are useful on their own). That and the D mod removal stacks especially well with Automated Ships, because in that case every source of CR is precious and because those ships can't be normally bought.
