[Iain Baker]

Hi there. Is there a way to instruct a support ship to repair and rearm a specific fighter/bomber? And if not - can I feature request this please, and if so how?

I ask as I was playtesting the other night and several of my wingmen had taken some damage, and one was below 10% hull. I got them to follow me to a safe area and called in the support ship. What does it do? Goes to the craft with say 95% hull first and only fixes the ‘10% hull and on fire’ fighter last - after repairing about four other only slightly damaged fighters. 😂 Grrrr…

A ‘rearm my target’ option on the comms menu would be ideal, especially if issuing the order pushes the craft to the head of the queue.

[Kie99]

There never has been as far as I can remember.  I think you could order a repair with cheats, but I've never seen the usefulness of it. 

Friendlies call for rearm when their missiles are depleted anyway, you can't see how many missiles they've got left.  On the repair side, subsystems are self repairing if not completely destroyed, and a friendly fighter that's taken so much damage that it's lost a subsystem altogether will probably be dead before the support ship gets to it.

[Novachen]

In the normal game it is only possible with cheat codes.

so www.freespace2.com and ~+R on the target.
Saved me many restarts of missions, when mission critical ships were disabled by accident.

There are very few mods which add a "Rearm/Repair my target" order in the comm menu for the support ship. But i ever saw that only in one or two occasions.

[Iain Baker]

There never has been as far as I can remember.  I think you could order a repair with cheats, but I've never seen the usefulness of it. 

Friendlies call for rearm when their missiles are depleted anyway, you can't see how many missiles they've got left.  On the repair side, subsystems are self repairing if not completely destroyed, and a friendly fighter that's taken so much damage that it's lost a subsystem altogether will probably be dead before the support ship gets to it.

Fair point but my mod has support ship hull repair too, so there is a second reason for calling in support ships. I’m guessing that since retail doesn’t use support ship hull repair V never thought about how it might be used, or how to get the AI to use it properly.

[Iain Baker]

In the normal game it is only possible with cheat codes.

so www.freespace2.com and ~+R on the target.
Saved me many restarts of missions, when mission critical ships were disabled by accident.

There are very few mods which add a "Rearm/Repair my target" order in the comm menu for the support ship. But i ever saw that only in one or two occasions.

Thank you, that sounds promising. Any idea what mods that was in?

Also - how does one feature-request things, since this would be handy to add to future FSO builds, if possible. Cheers.

[0rph3u5]

There is a SEXP called "good-rearm-time" that overrides the AI's reluctance to rearm for any reason.

You could tie an events that uses it to a button press for an immediate fix. I would also recommend to increase the number of support ships at the same time if you do that.

[Mongoose]

I always wanted this feature for those occasions when one of my poor bastard wingmen would end the mission disabled and with their comms destroyed, so they couldn't even call for help to fix their engines.

[BengalTiger]

There is a SEXP called "good-rearm-time" that overrides the AI's reluctance to rearm for any reason.

You could tie an events that uses it to a button press for an immediate fix. I would also recommend to increase the number of support ships at the same time if you do that.

It could get tied to an event triggered by a wingman having low health.

Some sort of IF Alpha 2 has less than 30% HP, then trigger the rearm.