Repairing weapons/armor using similar techniques as crafting them

[scotty110]

Currently repairing weapons and armor involves buying the repair kits needed and typing /repair along with the location or the weapon/armor  ie: /repair righthand or /repair torso. What bothers me is realistically it shouldn't be possible to repair your gear while you have it equipped (how the heck would you be able to repair the back of your torso armor???).

What I think would work would be to repair armor much like you would craft it in the first place, the simple way would be to buy the needed repair kits and place one of those and the weapon/armor to be repair on a blacksmith bench and use the combine button the same way you would combine a sword blade with a hilt, a few moments later and the piece would be repaired however much based on skill and luck.

A more complex way would be having to include other items during the repair process, animal hides for leather armor, metal ingots for chainmail/knives/daggers, metal stocks for plate/swords/maces, maybe blacksmiths/leatherworkers could craft specific repair kits based on the type of armor. and again those kits/items would be combined with the piece at a blacksmith bench.

[Bragan]

The whole idea of having the repair kits is so that you can perform the repairs in the field, where it's more useful. You certainly shouldn't need a smith table to repair a weapon, which only consists of sharpening the blade, anyway (OK, this is obviously only true for bladed weapons, but I'd ask you what kind of repair you'd need to perform on a hammer. Smithing hammers do require precise shapes to be maintained, but a nick or dent won't make any difference to the tefusang's face you're smashing in).

I always figured that removing the armor being repaired is RPed. In any case, if you're attacked you immediately slip into a combat stance, which interrupts the repair. It's like how you don't need to equip tongs to put things into and take them out of the forge/furnace, and don't need to wear special leather clothing to withstand the heat of the forge.

If any changes were warranted I would instead suggest that we need to be able to get more uses out of our repair kits, or they should be both cheaper and lighter to reflect their single-use nature.

[zinder]

It might be better to rename what is currently repair into maintenance and have actual repair as a subset of crafting recipes.

Oiling and removing gore and fluids before they set in and cause smell, rust or imbalances in handling. Rewrap the grip, tighten connections, sharping edges on weapons. Oil the leathers, tighten straps, straighten out dents on armour. I'd place the limit on fixing small failures, i.e a patch under a cut that didn't go quite trough a leather armor or replacing a few broken rings on a chain mail. All that would be the played out aspects of what you do with a current repair kit and the repair skill. That is what you can do without major tools in the field and why i think renaming repair to maintenance would be better.

Damage that goes beyond the above, i.e holed plate, cut up leathers and ripped chain for armour and broken blades, shafts or heads for weapons, would require actual crafting. As you need to make the damaged part anew - reforge the blade, head or plate, cut and carve a new shaft, replace the cut up or ripped facing with a new one. That should need more time, replacement ingredients and crafting tools.

[Entevir]

wear special leather clothing to withstand the heat of the forge.

And for the enkis among us. Loose all that hair on the front if you dont. 

I do agree with Zinder though. Propper maitenance is all you can do in the middle of nowhere. You can't fix a plate armor that is at 0 quality to maxium with a hammer and some spare parts the same way you cannot stich a wound with a scalpel and bandages. Both might do some semblance of good but honestly its more a joke then anything.

Maitenance should work while the armor quality has not dropped past a certain point. Every so many points of quality it would be impossible to fix past it without serious reworking. Say the cut-off is every five points. If i repair armor that is at 46 i can go up to max. If I repair armor that is at 45... Well I just wasted a repair kit.

[Nivm]

 Instead of using cut-offs every five points or so, shouldn't it be a percentile based on the amount being repaired? Usually the end product doesn't care how many links in a mail you need to replace, or how much sharpening the blade requires. All that matters is time and material, which the kit supposedly provides (be nice to see what's in the kit).

 As nitpicking, you can fix up a wound on the field about as well as you can anywhere else in Yliakum. Just need a steady hand, some clean tools, and the catgut. Although it is a lot harder when you're doing it yourself.

[Bragan]

If it's going to be split into maintenance and repair though, then the formulae that determine the resulting quality need to be reworked. There's no way that even a beginner could do such a bad job of sharpening a blade that it goes from Q213 to Q205 for example. This happened to me, with 19 in my Repair Weapons. In RL, I've begun to sharpen my own kitchen knives. Freehand, with a stone. Took me about 3 tries before I could actually improve on the factory blade's sharpness. More generally, I have not heard of any (appropriate) preventative maintenance regime that is liable to seriously damage the equipment being maintained because of a small error. A large error, yes, but that's why you get training.

[zinder]

In RL, I've begun to sharpen my own kitchen knives. Freehand, with a stone. Took me about 3 tries before I could actually improve on the factory blade's sharpness. More generally, I have not heard of any (appropriate) preventative maintenance regime that is liable to seriously damage the equipment being maintained because of a small error. A large error, yes, but that's why you get training.

That says more about the kind of kitchen knives you buy than about how difficult sharpening is. Kitchen knives usually have the simplest edges you can make unless you are willing to shell out serious money. They are easy to sharpen or resharpen, too, since they have a very simple blade geometry.

Unless that weapon is just decoration, you will do more than preventive maintenance. Each fight risks making little nicks and scrapes in the edge, aside from loosing sharpness. Any armor your opponent might wear, and for example a bad parade or hitting a bone, too, may damage the edge. If you don't go about restoring the edge the right way, you can loose cutting power.

[Bragan]

A weapon to be used in combat needs to be easily repaired, for the very reason that it's likely to be damaged, and unlikely to have the ideal workspace. This essentially translates to a simple, easily-maintained blade geometry: one to two bevels, chisel- or flat-ground, plain non-serrated edge. With this, you can sharpen a blade with nothing more than a whetstone. Complex blade construction such as laminated steel, differential quenching, etc are not a problem since the physical properties of the steel don't change with battle or grinding.

You're right, preventative maintenance is the wrong term. But for any tool that requires constant maintenance, that maintenance must be easily performed otherwise the tool simply isn't useful.

[zinder]

As far as i know any of the common edges can be made with nothing but a whetstone. Some need more complicated motions than others, but if you learned the motion and can recognize which edge a given item has, you can sharpen it. This is something you should be able to do with relatively low skill, compared to the skill cap. But using the wrong technique on an edge is still a danger early on.

But restoring a edge that's been damaged is something else. You lost material in that case, at least in something like 90% of the time. It is not just making that section sharp again, but you need to sharpen it in such a way that.. I don't really have the word in english. You have to keep the shape of the edge intact. No places where the edge moves back from the cutting line, no wavy line along the edge. The techniques to do that are not noticeably harder than just sharpening, they are mostly the same actually. But the knowledge which to use and on how much of a length of the edge to apply them, and when to stop, judging when, or even if, you have achieved a proper flow of the edge again, is very difficult.

And that last bit, while wholly fitting for tools, is not as rigid for weapons. IIRC the vaunted Katana needs quite some maintenance and a normal battle of its time could routinely destroy more swords than it killed fighters. Nonetheless it is considered a good, useful weapon.