The Mercy series of repair corvettes evolved from the original maintenance shuttles from the Mothership construction program. These small-hulled ships would dart in among the larger vessels, refueling and repairing when needed. The two-man crew was also equipped for emergency evac, and they were often called upon to pull pilots and engineers from the wreckage after a collision caused by guidance errors. As it became obvious that the expeditionary fleet would have to be combat capable, it was natural to take these "mercy" shuttles and adapt them to light combat repair and refueling duty.

The corvette design evolved naturally as design teams layered the basic shuttle frame with composite armor layers and a small turret for self-protection. A series of lateral ports allows a Mercy corvette to vent reaction plasma directly into the drive system of a docked fighter. Recent advancements in miniaturization technologies have allowed engineers to mount a variant of the Phased Disassembler Array in the nose section of the Mercy. Essentially running in reverse of the operations performed onboard the Provider Class Resource Collector, the Mercy's PDA, with a skilled engineer in the co-pilots chair and some of the most advanced structural software in the fleet, can basically break down the damaged portions of a larger ship and reconstruct them layer by layer. While this system is painfully slow, a flight of Mercy class corvettes can maintain the armor of a capitol ship as easily as they can service squadrons of strike craft that have retreated from battle.

The Repair Corvette can also repair larger ships with the ol' "magic beam." That is the Repair Corvette's main utlilty, since Support Frigates are available at about the same time, and waiting for fighters to queue up one at a time to be serviced by a Repair Corvette is impractical.