Out of curiosity, Calico Jack, why did you bring a pipe wrench on a Goldfish? With 400 armour, the mallet is more efficient on that ship.
It's a theory I'm testing for countering gatling attacks on hulls - the mallet repairs more but takes 9 seconds to cool down, by which time the hull may be going down - I've seen captains recommending spanners in that situation but they don't seem to work for me. I'm still undecided if it's better or not.
The thing is, 5 secs is too long to wait for repairs when youre under fire. A heavy clip'd gatling can take down a goldfish's armor in under 5 secs, even if it's buffed (assuming no repairs, or repairs are on cd). To survive 1 full heavy clip'd gat magazine in a goldfish, you need buffed armor and a mallet hit (and 1 or 2 spanner hits), or pray that the enemy gunner misses/gets disabled/hits the front gun for about .5 secs. Also pray that nothing else is helping to chip away at your armor, because you'll be in a world of hurt.
Some math- a heavy clip'd gat will deal 765 damage per magazine to armor. Goldfish has 400 armor, 520 when buffed. 520 armor + 250 armor (from mallet hit) = 770 armor. An unbuffed goldfish should have its armor taken out with just 1 magazine of gat fire, but a buffed goldfish will just barely live through it if you get a mallet hit in (and 2 spanner hits before that mallet hit will optimize armor uptime).
This is all assuming that the enemy is ONLY firing 1 gat with heavy clip at you. Even assuming the enemy misses a fair bit, mallet/spanner is best for repairs. You can't beat the low cd of the spanner and the efficiency and repair strength of the mallet.