TL;DR - Give Void Shields a numerical value to soak damage before it's applied to the Armour and Hull.

This came about due to our game sessions ending way later than they should. I like the unpacking of BFG stats--armour, speed, hull--so that you have a larger variety between certain things.

It's just weird that a transport up to a light cruiser can absorb exactly one hit, regardless of what's being fired at it. So we're thinking of switching 1 Void Shield for 10 damage points, with the remainder of that hit being applied on its own to the Armour: useless for macrobatteries, but okay for lances.

This will let us give transports say 8 Void Shield Points while Light Cruisers can have up to 15, provided it has the proper upgrades/systems.

The secondary goal is to give more upgrade options to Void Shields. There's not much in that department.

Has anyone ever experimented with something like this?

I gave the group an archeotech void shield upgrade that basically acted like a Toughness Bonus, that worked pretty well. I use math-hammer though, so YMMV.

The concept's solid enough, there's no real reason not to treat it like those conversion field things.

I just don't let shields recharge for every firing ship. As with BFG, shields go down for the entire round. It makes the multi-ship battles go much, much faster. And I like simple and streamlined.

I've invented different shield types for random Xenos races that I'll brew up for my players to face. I keep Void Shields as is though because my players don't need any additional help surviving. It's true that one void shield isn't particularly helpful, but I've never really found it very unbalancing. It is true that if it didn't recharge until the start of combat then a group of Raiders could finally pose a threat to a PC Cruiser, whereas right now they just hope they crit the shields offline before they even stand a chance.

A Toughness bonus might actually work as well. Do they absorb any hits first then collapse and just provide a Toughness "shield"?

This isn't really for us and our ships. I mean, not just us. We kinda blast through enemy ships' shields rather easily. With Squadron rules in effect for most of our opponents, our shields stay down anyway and with Math Hammer they don't do much. It'll be harder for us to bring down a Void Shield that absorbs 12 points of damage (not counting MH's auto +12).

The component I gave them was described as a 'kinetic energy thief'. While not a void shield itself, it worked in conjunction with one. Basically it projected one of the void shields around the ship to a much further out range, making it into a web that stole kinetic energy from anything coming within range. Faster the movement, more the reduction. I think it reduced hit damage by 1 per void shield or something.

I tend to go with a max resistance with a power reserve. Less simplified but better simulation of overloading. Each shield has two numbers. The first is the maximum amount it can absorb from each hit. The second is how much energy is in reserve for the remainder of the round. If the energy reserve is less than the shield resistance than the resistance is treated as being equal to the energy reserve.

Example. Lets say that the shield has a resistance of 10 and a reserve of 25. Three hist land with damage of 11, 10 and 10.

The first hit exceeds shield resistance by one and treat one damage is treated a a hit with 1 damage. The reserve energy is reduced from 25 to 13. The second hit is completely blocked by the shields resistance and the energy reserve is reduced from 13 to 3. The effective resistance of the shield is now 3. The third hit exceeds the shield by seven damage that goes to the ship and the shields energy is reduced to 0 for the remainder of the round. Multiple layers of shields are resolved successively after each other until any remaining damage reaches the hull.

Edit: I think it does better to reset the shield each turn rather than each round to simulate simultaneous combat rather than having it be as each taking turns in real time to break down shields. Alternatively each shield reserve could just reset to at least the base resistance each round. Each round a shield does not take a hit it regenerates the power requirements in addition to base resistance up to maximum reserve.

Way I see it unless you have extra ships firing each round it is like TB... now the second hit on it is "shorted out".... Fairly simple all in all