When repairing, can you choose to leave certain parts damaged? For instance, say I prefer the handling of a ship with a mostly cosmetic part removed.asked by Anzig

Yeah! One of the nice things that we're trying to make sure of with the repair systems is: What you're repairing has direct impact on your ship. You're not going to be fixing the decals on the outside in space when you've been damaged. That's more something for when you go back to port. But when you have to fix a powerplant or a shield generator... that's the stuff we're going to be giving to you to really be fixing up well.

Basically all repair actions require some impetus. You have to do a thing to make the repair happen at all so if you simply don't do that thing, the repair doesn't happen.