Looking at the schedule of UST buffs, I determined that the best time to npc hunt (if you have universal maintenance researched) is either early Tuesday GST or early Sunday GST. If you time it right, you can have up to four UST buffs on your ship at once. Just before 0:00 GST, activate the two available buffs. A few minutes later, the next day's buffs are available. Activate those as well and you have four buffs total for almost four hours.

That being said, early Sunday is the best time to npc hunt if maximum npc attack is what you want. You can have the targeting alignment (+10% npc attack) from Saturday and emitter overcharge (+8% attack) and harmonic calibration (+20% shield) from Sunday. If it's longevity that you want, the best time is early Tuesday with thruster alignment (+10% defense) from Monday and inner stabilization (+30% hull) and targeting alignment from Tuesday.

I'm lazuli fixer right now, and fully buffed (including crux, warp fuel, and decoy) with +30% hull, +10% defense, and +10% npc attack from the UST, I was actually able to keep fighting npc's without ever repairing my hull or restoring my shields. I was able to because of my massive hull bonus (+319% counting kalvium), npc defense bonus (74% temporary, 112% counting npc defense mods), and npc attack bonus (93% temporary, 123% including surge plexi). Without using any repairs or restorers, I would rank before my hull got down to 10%. If you're ever lazuli fixer, this is an awesome npc hunting strategy!

I don't use repair i just shield buff and restore it when needed

I'm looking to go Lazuli Fixer somewhere down the road as well, and I agree, some good tips in that post.

repairing during npc runs....haven't thought about that inna while

On the last mission now. With a Nanite capsule, I'll have 30k hull. If I ever get around to putting Syncopates on my ship, it should be a lot higher.

EDIT: Cheeky.

And that should allow me to auto-rank without repairing.

one can only hope

This is good info, but completely useless to me.
i auto rank NPCs without repairing or using any restorers and barely use any of my 22k hull before i rank again.
my current rank is 570

This is good info, but completely useless to me.
i auto rank NPCs without repairing or using any restorers and barely use any of my 22k hull before i rank again.
my current rank is 570

How awesome for you.

It's not that hard to auto rank w/o repairs. What you should be looking at, for that purpose, is shield as opposed to hull. Get yourself a set of tetras and a decent shield pool and your shield/hull will only go down very very slowly as the regen will cover most of the damage you take. Ofc, extra hull never hurts, it's more "padding" for what your regen cannot cover. But it'd still be easier if you focus more on shield.
This becomes more and more true as you rank up, as the time it takes to rank via NPC increases as your rank increases. this means over the course of the rank, more % shield is generated due to increase in time.
Normally my shield is just over 1/3 of my hull, but during auto ranking, each rank the shield will regen an amount roughly equal to my buffed hull.

^ This. (Except i think you meant tera pulsers instead of tetras)

then why did you necro it from over 1 year ago

He really needed to "show off".

awww your cute