Engineering

The engineering room aboard all ships in ToH is a ship location where engineering and general power ups can be placed and which can be upgraded to improve your repair speed.

The Officer in charge of Bridge is Deidre Grace, your Chief Engineer.

Engineering function
Engineering serves as the repair and health department. While this section does not necessarily play an active role in combat, it does give passive bonuses, such as damage avoidance and HP boosts.



Upgrading Engineering
Improving Engineering level improves your fire fighting speed. Ship levels seem to be ship-specific, so the below table may not be 100% accurate.

At level 1, Fire Repair Speed is 3

At level 2, Fire Repair Speed is 4

At level 3, Fire Repair Speed is 5

At level 4, Fire Repair Speed is 5

At level 5, Fire Repair Speed is 5

At level 6, Fire Repair Speed is 5

At level 7, Fire Repair Speed is 5

At level 8, Fire Repair Speed is 5

At level 9, Fire Repair Speed is 5

At level 10, Fire Repair Speed is 5

Engineering Equipment
Most, but not all standard* equipment comes in five versions: Common (White), Uncommon (Green), Rare (Blue), Very Rare (Purple) and Legendary (Gold). * Please note that some of the unique equipment awarded from live events may have different initial and maximum levels. Unique equipment is more powerful than the comparable standard equipment, and may combine the functions of multiple equipment types. For example, it may increase system level and hull strength.
 * Common Equipment starts out at level 1, and can be upgraded to level 2.
 * Uncommon Equipment starts out at level 2, and can be upgraded to level 4.
 * Rare Equipment starts out at level 3, and can be upgraded to level 6.
 * Very Rare Equipment starts out at level 4, and can be upgraded to level 8.
 * Legendary Equipment starts out at level 5, and can be upgraded to level 10.
 * Armor - Boosts HP. Component names: lv 1 - 100mm Alloy Armor, lv 2 - 250mm Alloy Armor, lv 3 - 500mm Alloy Armor, lv 4 - 800mm Alloy Armor, lv 5 - 1400mm Alloy Armor
 * Fire Mitigation Manifold - Allows multitouch for fighting multiple fires simultaneously. Available only in "Rare" (blue) Version.
 * Computer - Reduces incoming hull damage. Component names: lv 1 - Tactical Processor, lv 2 - Vectorylic Processor, lv 3 - Ternary Processor, lv 4 - Photonic Computer, lv 5 - Intellic Evasion Computer
 * Nanites - increase combat hull repair speed. Component names: lv 1 - Nanite Factory, lv 2 - Recycling Replicator,, lv 3 - Nanite Assembler, lv 4 - Nanite Fluid Distributor, lv 5 - Adaptive Assembler
 * Fire Fighting System - increases the speed of repairs to tiles damaged by fire. Component names: lv 1 -  Repair informatics, lv 2 - Detection Matrix, lv 3 - Repair Web, lv 4 - Diagnostic Unit, lv 5 - Telemetric Facilitator

Strategy
The problem with Engineering is that it is currently focused on fire fighting, which is a weak non-battle ability. Fight well, and you'll almost never see fires, meaning that there's little point to using level boosters, fire mitigation manifolds and fire fighting systems. Fires that aren't put out in time have to be repaired for a a set amount of Metal (if the tile did not contain conduit) or Plasma (if it did). Only one tile can be repaired at a time, and the cost is leveled to your current ship.

If you do care about fire fighting, then here's a tip: after a battle where you take fires, go to engineering and install your fire fighting components. Then go fight fires. Then uninstall them replacing them with a bit more useful battle components. Also if you want to fight fires do not upgrade past level 3 as there is no bonus, (confirmed PNS Coronado).

Second, everything else in engineering is purely for reducing damage. And if you are taking damage, you are taking system damage, and system damage is the main reason you loose battles. If you are taking system damage, a few more hitpoints or reparing few dozen hitpoints in battle (a pathetic amount anyway) will not change much. So the remaining three components - armors, computers, and nanites - are not really important; you should focus on strengthening your active defenses so you are never hit instead.

Use this room to level up level boosters which are then moved to more important parts of the ship; stack the rest of the spaces with armors, nanites and computers, and curse the devs for not making this room useful. (Why are the metal/plasma/warp charges generators and upgrade speeders on the bridge...?).