I have found no way to faithfully reproduce the issues but one way to make the mechanic to disappear with some success rate seem to be:

• Go to Phobos
• Visit the Repair Shop
• Enter the Paint Shop
• Close Pioneer (Alt + F4)
• Resume game
• Visit Repair Shop which now most likely don't have the staff present

Ehhh... You might be better served refactoring the module to remove the dependence on the file-scope global stationSeed variable and instead pass it as a direct dependency to the various functions. That kind of global state is a huge bug vector.

Haven't dug much further into the module, but you should be safe to assume that station.seed is valid (though maybe not always nonzero) as I recall improving the consistency of seed generation in previous system-gen PRs.

... refactoring the module to remove the dependence on the file-scope global stationSeed variable and instead pass it as a direct dependency to the various functions.

I'm just starting to get confident with the mission modules and the views have a different 'feel' to them. I'm pretty lost here right now. Spontaneously, I could maybe touch up the Issue instead and focus on some other part of the code that I know better. A tactical retreat...

Having taken a closer look at the module, this is a good change on the face of it.

Refresh is called when switching to the specific view tab within the station view - it should also be called when the station view is opened with that tab already active (though don't quote me on that). The view table specifies a draw function which renders the module (probably drawPaintshop) and the refresh function is meant to be used to refresh state that may have changed while the player is on other views.

@sturnclaw I don't know what to do here. The way I understand the code, the stationSeed shouldn't be set in determinePaintshopAvailability() and this PR fixes that. It tests fine on my side. I can reproduce the issue with high confidence and the fix works for me 100%. Anything more advanced, well, probably someone else should take over the

Merge/Close/Someone else takes over?

You are correct, setting stationSeed here is invalid regardless of the context of any other issues with the module. I'll merge this and we can address the general module design at a later date (read: probably never).