I was pondering the weapon/engine disabling functionality, and a possible idea for shields came to mind.
In reading a post earlier where you talked about having to turn your ship when the weapons on one side became disabled due to enemy fire, it occurred to me that having something similar for shields would be rather interesting.
I really enjoy the way shields work currently, and I don't really want a huge change to them, but it would be fascinating to see a heavy salvo of torpedoes overload the port shields, and leave you scrambling to turn the ship around to avoid being so vulnerable while that shield projector rebooted/repaired itself.
The obvious downside to this idea, is that it might take a fair amount of development time to put into place, and considering how excited I am to see the next iteration of the game on my computer, far be it from me to slow you down, ha ha.
But on the outside chance that such a thing wouldn't be too hard to put into place, this could be pretty fun to see in game at some point. And from my point of view, very little would have to be changed "visually" to make this work. For instance, on the forward shield version having half the shield fail shouldn't be too complex of a job, but where I see possible issues, are having an omni shield partially fail, I suppose it could be done by not allowing the omni shield to traverse on the "broken/failed" half of the ship for the duration of it's downtime, hmm, yeah that might work. I suppose that 360 shields would be as relatively easy as the forward shields, just have the damaged half stop rendering/having effect.
Anyways, just a fun idea, that came to mind while thinking about the new changes to combat brought about by weapon and engine disabling functionality. I can't wait to see those changes in the game itself, very exciting indeed.