Well, have you ever played Starcraft or seen the movie Aliens? Obviously aliens that feed off of dark matter and breed in space arent realistic, then again neither are plasma weapons or giant space carriers ;) Obviously this is a fantasy (well, science-fiction) world, but what we are striving to do is to make it believable and make the player feel like they are in a military outfit fighting against impossible outfits on the edge of the known galaxy.
We were always going to have armour-repair pods, except the way it was going to be handled is the player had a certain amount of "supply drops" that they could call in, which would make a supply ship zoom in and drop them off nearby, now the repair pods are just scattered throughout a level.
The way the repair pods work is using some pretty cool nano-robotics. Once activated they release thousands of nano-bots that repair damaged metals, plastics, composites, power conduits etc. That is it would be cool if they actually existed, but they do in the world of Alpha 7 =)