Would it be difficult to implement an armor value for shields much like hulls have? I understand that it'd throw off balance in the vanilla game a bit but perhaps it could be worked in that it only factors in if the attribute is set, much like with the fire origin offsets? IE, if you set a shield_armor to something, it'll use that value, otherwise it defaults to 0 (which is the current on all shields I believe).
I would find it... useful. :)