Shields

[Kelly Pedersen]

Another idea to encourage derring-do and stunts with small fighters is to assume that small craft can actually get under a big ship's shield, and do direct damage there. Spaceships tends to assume that force screens roughly conform to the ship's hull, but if you assume they're more classic Star Trek-style "big bubbles", you can assume that a sufficiently small ship can go underneath the shield but still not crash into the bigger ship's hull, and then do much more immediate damage without having to deal with the shield's DR. This can be combined with the ablative suggestions above - if the shield has to be battered down to a certain level before a small craft has a chance of slipping through it rather than just crashing against it.

Offhand, I'd suggest that to do this, the smaller ship has to be 6 or more SMs smaller than the larger one. That means that SM +10 ships (the smallest I really think count as "capital ships") need tiny SM +4 fighters to slip into, and you don't get SM +10 ships being able to slip into a bigger ship's shields until you hit the truly huge SM +16.