Support Ships as part of a Fleet are a Liability

[Raptor34]

Support Ships need to be scaled up to the size of your fleet - that's the problem; they have one dock for L and XL ships and it takes forever to use. Ideal deployment is one third support ships, one third carriers, one third destroyers. Note carriers need to be told to Get Supplies to help resupply, which they will assist with on S and M vessels.

Support Ships have deep reserves of drones, so as drone carriers they excel. They are also well shielded and, if you choose the right equipment, can be competitively fast. If supplying L and XL ships you need more of them - that's the key to compensate for that docking speed.

Yes, I wish they could repair and outfit faster, but then the bottleneck would be the supply resources they can store. If that's not a bottleneck then they become super-capacity traders. How long things take, and how much can be done between activity sessions, is at the heart of game design. NPCs use them fine, but NPCs don't scale up fleets like players do. One support ship for a fleet of destroyers is not enough. Build more of them.

Logical. Does the whole thing work intelligently? Like if they need repairs would the destroyers spread themselves out well? At least well enough that it makes you question why you ever added more than 1 aux ship, i.e. they don't just all queue at one ship and ignore the others.

[Targ Collective]

Yes, support ships scale up correctly. I'm not sure how smart the code is, but support ships will definitely be used in groups. It's possible the code accounts for supply resources left on them, it definitely accounts for how many of them are in your fleet. Useful for mining fleets and trading fleets that use missile defences.