Restorers are mainly used on ship class that cannot run full supports, or are limited in them.

SS and CV, but mainly CV.

For BB, the restore ability on your support is enough to give good SD to the point you hit the cap around BB3-4 with regular BVEd crew. And each of them are only giving SD as a secondary effect, their primary being OH or repping.

A restorer main function at that point becomes useless, and its only value is the ridiculous ammount of rep it gives. Much better having an actual extra rep than a restore. Or an engy.

Adding more engi's past 5 still can increase your ship speed. I just tested it. It works something like this:

1eng = 100%
2eng = 141%
3eng = 173%
4eng = 200%
5eng = 224%
6eng = 245%
7eng = 265%
8eng = 283%
9eng = 300%

(this simplifies things, and assumes all your engineers have the exact same true ability. the percentage is the true ability of the engineers that actually contributes to ship speed.)

On another note, 4 elite supervetted reps will only provide about 6million true ability each. a supervetted elite engi will provide about 1.5mil repair. I think the cap is around 35mil, so even with that - you will still have trouble reaching the cap.

You're right, and I took that into account when doing these calculations. It's the reason that I chose lv 55 as the classification, because that is an intercept point of the two (or somewhere close at least). at level 79, my hybrid crew runs at 39knots on H39, but they are still lacking in experts. I just hope that all the old formulas are still valid, which is why I'm waiting before making a major post about all this stuff. Here's some of the numbers:

With elite Engi's at level 95, 100 vets and full experts; the true ability that is actually applied to ship speed are:

1 - 3,216,237
2 - 4,548,446
3 - 5,570,686
4 - 6,432,474
5 - 7,191,725

Assuming this crew is for and H44, 7 of my hybrid engis at the same level are:

7 - 6,236,810

- So 7 of my hybrids, which are only base 11 in engineering have nearly the same true ability(applied to ship speed) as 4 EBVE engis.

I have been turning this quite a bit in my head these last days.

At the moment it looks like you trade repair ability against lots more OH time. According to my calculations, you'd just about hit the rep cap at lvl 120 (on NFNA where a boost gives +20% ability).

I wonder if you class the hybrid engies not at lvl 55, but later (65 -> 75...), you'd rep cap a little bit earlier (or, if you play on NFEU like me, you even reach the rep cap at lvl 120 with only the +10% boost) and still have around 90s more OH time (165s with 4 standard engies -> 250s with 8 "hybrids").