Any part that needs to be replaced on a star ship in any regular interval is made in the star ship's machine shop. This reduces the need for the ship to be in a star base port, or have storage rooms full of star ships parts considerably. With a machine shop and a few storage rooms, a few parts can be kept on hand. When a part is needed, it's taken from the storage room and the old part is feed into the replicator stock. When a particular part stock is starting to run short, the Machine shop is set up for a run of that part.

As a general rule, the worst parts of making a part in setting up the machine shop up to make a run. Once a machine shop has been set up to make a part, it can start to make more of the same part with little trouble.

For example, the ship is running low on photon torpedo casing. The set up time for a run of casing is going to take 3 days and 10 crewmembers. After that, it will take two more days to make sure that the torpedo casing coming from the shops are being assembled correctly. After that, the machine shop can start to crank out torpedo casing at the rate of 24 per day with now 75 people working production run in a 24-hour period. By the second day, the shop is pushing out 58 casings with the same 75 people. The third day the 75 persons are pushed out at their most efficient rate of 72 casing per day. At this point the ships machine shop is working at maximum efficiency and cannot be made much faster without permanently setting up the machine shop to build torpedo casing. This run can continue like this till the shop is reset to make a new ship part, the replicate stocks run out, or the ships completely filled with torpedo casing to the point where walking around in the halls become troublesome.

It should be noted that the machine shop is more of NPC area. In most cases of complex parts, they are just kept in storage and when replaced, the old worn parts are thrown into the replicator to make new ones. In some cases, a part needs to be replaced but its not kept on hand. If a part that normally is not kept in storage, this means its not expected to need replacing that often. Replacing such a part is going to take more time, manpower, and power to make this part.