How will you make ship repair accessible to the new player, deep enough to support gameplay focused on repair,and rewarding of increasing player skill?asked by Amontillado

By making each action really small and condensed. You're doing a series of very small, condensed actions of... you know, I'm gonna go over to my broken powerplant and I'm going open it up and see that it's on fire. So, I'm going to use my extinguisher to put that fire out. But, identifying that as the issue is part of the gameplay – there's the diagnostic element. There's the triage element. And then there's the subcomponent replacement element. Each of those things is a simple process and don't particularly have... there's not a high barrier of entry on that.Where there is a lot of complexity is... all of this damage gets propagated into your ship based on the actual combat and the actual events of the game and the manner in which you take damage and the ways that you're stressing your ship are going to lead to different kinds of damage behaviours that will require different paired actions to fix. What that means is that if you lose shields, that's a problem and the quickest path between not having shields to having shields again is not going to be clear to the inexperienced repairman. So, understanding which parts of this shield component are critical to it functioning at all versus the ones that allow it to have a lot of health or fast recharge or accommodates the coolant – these each function separately so you can have a terrible but functional component if you choose to repair only the critical path which could be difference between life and death in combat and then if you are noob you can work through in whatever order you discover these issues, you can work through them and solve them individually until eventually you have a working component again and through doing that you might organically begin to discover which parts of this are actually required for it to function versus which are required for it to be any good.

So yeah, a bunch of plans.

Yeah, it's important to have both levels of difficulty by layering a bunch of simple things.

Yeah, it's much more approachable as a learned action so, the more you play the better you get... or the more you invest yourself into the system, it's going to reward you for that personal investment.

Yeah... different components are also different so there will be plenty of things to learn about.