Actually, APR, AWR, BTTY, Lab, Sensors, Scanners, Impulse and Warp are all freebe repairs.
Having a repair strategy is just as important as the game strategy. Damage Control is about managing all those lucky hits your assailants managed to score on your ship.
If short of magic screws, I tend to pool weapons repairs on one side of the ship so that I can at least have the ability to have some concentrated firepower in some direction.
I've also noticed that systems under repair can be hit and destroyed, so sometimes it is better to wait until the onslaught, say a Drone wall is over with, then start with the repairs.
Another strategy, in a multi-player game, is playing a "Ptarmigan Bluff", where like the wild fowl, one delays any repairs for several minutes, makes a bogus attempt to disengage, which gives the enemy a chance to scan the vessel and see all those blacked out weapons systems.
The enemy will ususall, if sensible concentrate their fire on the more combat viable allies that pose a real threat. The enemy will believe that they'll be able to catch up and make a kill or capture later.
One can then start handing out the magic screws and make repairs, before making a surprise return to the battle.
I've played it a couple of times and have seen it played in both SFB and SFC LAN games.
In SFB, it plays on abusing the enemy's use of "Tactical Intelligence" rules, though in SFB one is pretending that there is no Damage Control Teams left onboard or that the damage has overwhelmed the surviving Damage Control teams. In SFC, that one has run out of materials for repair.