Page 208 of the fourth printing of
Campaign Operations has the following paragraph for replacements (and an equivalent rule for repairs exists elsewhere):
A Technical Team may not attempt to replace the same part twice, nor may another team of the same or lower Experience Rating attempt the job. Only a Technical Team with a higher Experience Rating may attempt to replace the part after a failed attempt. If an Elite team fails to install a part, the replacement part is destroyed during the installation attempt, but a new part may be obtained and installed. For this reason, most Technical Teams choose to be especially careful and spend extra time (see Extra Time, at right) when installing expensive new parts.
This does not have the desired effect, as Technical Teams with more experience leave less room for retries if they fail.For instance, if a player has four Elite Technical Teams, they can only make one attempt at replacing a given part. If they have Green, Regular, Veteran, and Elite Technical Teams, they can make four attempts. Thus, this rule encourages saving your
least-experienced personnel for important tasks, as once your most-experienced personnel give it a shot you are stuck with the outcome.
This also has an odd interaction with Rush Jobs, as they lower the effective skill rating of a Technical Team. Rather than encouraging Extra Time, this rule means that it makes sense to first use a Rush Job to lower the skill rating to Green, thus setting the required rating to Regular in the event of a failed roll. This can then be repeated with progressively less-rushed jobs, until finally switching to Extra Time once the required skill rating matches the Technical Team performing the task.
There's an easy way to fix this: change the rule so that the required skill rating of a job increases by one stage with each failure, independent of the skill rating of the Technical Team. For example, if a Veteran Technical Team fails the first attempt at replacing a part, that part would then require Regular or better (rather than Green or better, meaning anyone) for the second attempt. The Veteran Technical Team (or someone else) could then make another attempt: if that fails, the part would require Veteran or better. Only after failing that third attempt would an Elite Technical Team be required.
This approach eliminates the downsides of increased Skill Ratings, making them a pure benefit as was likely intended.
Note that Large Craft, Large Naval Support Vehicles, and Mobile Structures are always serviced by the same "team": this makes the Rush Job trick extremely important under current rules, as it is literally the only way to get additional attempts at fixing components as important as K-F Drives. My proposed change would simply tie the number of attempts to the skill rating, which is much more reasonable.
