Fission is the way to go for this for its general simplicity of design and it can self start by manually moving control rods. I never see anyone talking about they are going to restart a fusion reactor if it ever goes offline for any reason.
My thought is to use fission for powering the ship, and fusion for the drive. The fission reactors can start the fusion drive as needed and you can have multiple portable fission reactors like the NASA kilopower designs in an offline/inert state that could be powered on in an emergency.
Yeah residential is capped at 20kw of production for net-metering. I have array rated at 14.5kw and it tracks that at peak pretty well. I hope to add more panels, but they will not be part of my net-metering and be there to charge the future batteries and inverters I want to add.
I normally only commit to "We will give an update in X (minutes/hours) to make sure we understand the problem first. Then start giving estimated timelines in ranges with specific call outs for updates and possible changes to the timeline.
I've found that most management just want to be involved in the process and have definite times set for updates and can handle timeline changes as long as information is coming at regular intervals.