[Phantasm]

Originally Posted by warellis

Wouldn't you generally board after crippling the ship anyways?

That's not always an optimal solution. Pirates, for example, might want the ship mostly intact in order to steal it; in particular, they'll actually try to avoid damaging the engines in that situation, sending boarding parties to take the control room so they can fly it away on their own.

Even in wartime, boarding parties composed of Space Marines intent on sabotaging a power plant that's located in a Core system might not want to wait for the ship to be crippled before moving in.

In the source materials, boarding pods often hit a ship at the start of combat so that the PCs who aren't in command or gunnery positions have something to do in the defense of the ship while the larger battle rages around them.