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[xenoargh]

Changing it doesn't necessarily mean most of what you said above.  That's a straw-man position

Let's call one of these theoretical things Food and the other is just Repair Supplies.

Food is a constant drain.  You'd also need more of it to recover CR (most of which, IRL, is about crew recovery and doing the basics, like reloading ammunition bins and doing routine maintenance, which in the SS universe would be more automated than today but still quite stressful).  Food would be relatively cheap.

Repair Supplies, as their name suggest, are used to recover from damage.  A fleet that never takes any damage doesn't need them, but a big fleet that takes damage on a regular basis does.  Damage would be permanent unless Repair Supplies were available, and Repair Supplies would be relatively expensive.

That splits the functionality of Supplies into two logical areas, gives players some meaningful choices, and it's not hard to grasp what they're for.  They don't overlap in major ways- the only time we're using more Food than the baseline is when CR is being recovered, which also covers Logistics penalties.  But we don't have a triple-whammy of CR/Logistics/Repairs after winning a big fight with damaged ships; if we lack Repair Supplies, we can recover CR but not Armor and Hull, leaving our ships vulnerable.

[Aeson]

In the current implementation, ships drain some amount of supplies per day as long as they are active, regardless of the number of crew they carry. This indicates either a fuel consumption which is separate from the fuel used for hyperspace, or regular maintenance and replacement of worn-out parts, or both. I see no reason why the ships would drain food, and I see no reason why changing things from 'supplies' to 'food' and 'repair parts' would remove the supply drain due to ship maintenance. Therefore, if ships retain their current characteristics, then splitting 'supplies' into 'food' and 'repair parts' will change things from having one constantly draining resource into two constantly draining resources. I fail to see how this is better than the current model, nor do I see why the current maintenance cost of ships would go away just because we now have 'repair supplies' and 'food' instead of 'supplies'.

Also, routine maintenance will always involve non-edible supplies of one kind or another as nothing will ever be designed that can last forever. Proper lubrication and replacement of old or worn-out parts are both part of routine maintenance, and neither one of those generally consumes things which fit into the 'food' side of supplies; both, however, consume things which fit reasonably well in a 'repair supplies' category. Routine maintenance also does not typically require significantly greater food consumption than normal; it certainly isn't enough to justify a food cost for a frigate equivalent to the supply consumption of 200 crew.

One further note - there is no 'CR/Logistics/Repairs triple whammy' - the logistics cost of a fleet is equal to the sum of the number of supplies per day that any given ship can spend recovering CR, plus 1% of the total crew carried plus 2% of the total marines carried plus 10% of any crew/cargo/fuel surplus plus any current repair supply usage. CR recovery has no effect on the logistics rating, because the logistics rating already assumes that the ships are consuming supplies at the full rate required for CR recovery even when the current supply usage is only at the maintenance level rather than the recovery level; if it were otherwise, your little frigate at the start of the game would suddenly cost 10 times more logistics after every fight regardless of whether or not you picked anything at all up after the battle. A fleet's logistics cost is equal to its supply usage with the assumption that the ships are recovering CR; there is no feedback into supply usage due to the logistics rating except in the rare case that your logistics rating is pulled below its normal level for a sufficiently long period of time for the CR of fleet vessels which had full CR (or, at any rate, a higher CR than the limit imposed by the current logistics rating) to suffer significantly.

[xenoargh]

There is no reason why Repair Supplies would need a constant drain, if ships weren't damaged.  It's all arbitrary; it's not like we're realistically modeling logistics here

[Thaago]

How does having more than 1 type of supply resource for the players ships help anything? I'm not talking about the economy or industry or trading, but ship upkeep and maintenance. Maintenance/repair costs in credit and cargo values can and will be tweaked: having different resources has no impact on that balance. What different resources add is the need for micromanagement and the (very very high!) chance of unbalancing your supply load and being screwed.

The example given before was to split off regular maintenance supplies (and regaining CR) from repair supplies. First: you need to plan for how much combat damage you expect to take vs how long you'll be going vs trading goods etc. Thats another dimension of micro that I just don't see being worthwhile. After that micro is done, I see a couple scenarios:

1) You don't take any damage: a trading run or perfect combat. Your repair supplies are wasted space.
1b) You get in lots of these combats, or need to dodge fleets so are late, or get shunted through a wormhole (hey, it could happen): not only are your repair supplies wasted space, but now you're out of maintenance supplies and your repair supplies are laughing at you.
2) You take expected damage: your maintenance supplies and repair supplies are both consumed. No different from normal.
3) You take more damage than you expected: your repair supplies are dangerously depleted, or even gone. Your maintenance supplies are wasted space.

In all of these cases, a unified supplies is easier to manage AND equally (only when everything goes as planned) or more mechanically effective.

[xenoargh]

I think that comes down to balance changes that would make it work, though.

For example, 1 Repair Supply takes up 1 space, but does the "work" 3 Supplies used to do. 

Cost is tripled, so costs (in Credits) remains the same, but it's 3X more efficient in terms of cargo space used, at the cost of being more specialized. 

If you carry only a few, sure, you can get in big trouble, but that's a meaningful choice.

If it's all just 1:1 with how things work right now, I'm in agreement, it's both more risky and less efficient in most scenarios.  But if you can stock 10 Repair Supplies to take care of 30 units of damage repair, it makes sense and it's differentiated in a meaningful way.  That's part of the problem with the current commodities and hold sizes of Cargo-in-general, though; at some point, it's going to have to get differentiated better and probably the numbers will have to get tweaked in various areas to get the fit right.