The shield stuff is looking really good! Nice work. Another question: if my ship is inside your shield bubble, or even just my transporter pad, does that allow me to board you? Could be a worry for ships at anchor, but it is a nice touch of consistency. Perhaps shields totally disable enemy transporter pads inside them, so if you land your ship at an enemy city you cannot transport out of the bubble, either.
I'm not sure what to think about the hitpoints. The largest possible ships, as Mortius says, will not be able to do much against heavily fortified planets (since their weapon power hasn't been reduced). Consider this, too: every hit on your ship has a chance to reduce system effectiveness, including weapon effectiveness. Up to 400 enemies are focusing fire on you. But you can only fire on a handful of them at once. Even if your weapons' power is enough to destroy each building's hp 10 times over in a single hit, you're limited to reducing their weapons output by 1/400th. You can never do more than that in one shot, no matter how big your gun is. Meanwhile, you could be losing huge chunks of your own capability every second. Defence now seems to have an unreasonable advantage, particularly since the game encourages small numbers of ships while not discouraging vast numbers of weapons bases. And that's on top of the defensive space station, which can have the same hull volume as you, but doesn't have to waste much on fuel, engines or ftl.
A flat 10x reduction also worries me. The smallest starter ships were already made of tissue and are probably too weak to small-arms fire now. If there must be a reduction (which I'm not sure of), perhaps make it non-linear? Even a slight buff to shuttle-sized ships?
As Vwhatgoes says, certain players already have 4+ billion hp ships in play. That's not going to be very fair, one way or the other - especially since they can be infinitely recalled, and recalling now takes only a fraction of the time it did when they were designed. Most grandfather clauses rely on their exceptions not being endlessly reincarnated! We might have coped with one, but we would have been a little disconcerted if the Bismarck had popped up again the following Tuesday. My old battleships could kill a new Q255, max-armour & max volume ship in just four shots, if the dice are with them.
In Star Trek the balance always seems to be that, faced with an overwhelming enemy, you can take about 4/5 hits before shields go down, 3/4 hits after that till you die. Just from a narrative point-of-view, that feels about right. Good tension. Might be a reasonable baseline? E.g., no capital ship should be one-shotted. Biggest weapon in the game should kill you in c.10 hits? That's time enough to warp if you're quick; but it wouldn't be easy and you might take a critical or disabling hit first. It's really hard to know how much shields will help without knowing their recharge rate.
An idea:
Dedicated anti-planet weapons. Perhaps a ship can use the planet's predictable movement and gravity to use ultra-long range explosives against it. Such a ship would be able to sit out of reach of orbital defences and bomb them down. But it would be a very slow process, perhaps taking several days for a moderate-sized defence base, and a great deal of hull volume would have to be used to make the weapon effective. If defending fleets arrived in time, the bombardment ship would not have the right weapons to defeat them - it would be outfought in every way. So, ordinary ships would have trouble with planets: invasion would have to be a deliberate and dedicated affair: you couldn't just run around in your personal flagship conquering everything. But when you did put in that dedication, you'd have a reasonable chance. Such a division between bomb-ketches and ships-of-the-line might add an interesting layer to war play. It might incidentally alleviate the problem of being invaded while you're asleep or at work. Ordinary ships might have to defeat any space stations before your bombards could move in.
EDIT: Ikkir made the point that small craft might become more important. If their weapons are beefed up with the update, and if NPCs gain the ability to pilot them, I can see carriers becoming exactly the sort of anti-planet weapon I describe - the mothership stays out of range. More fun too. But in that case, it would still be nice if carrier ships had some sort of trade-off against direct firepower. Perhaps you have to allocate significant volume to support facilities for each flight crew; which would still allow you to have as many vehicles as you like for personal use (as is currently the case).
I'm not sure what to think about the hitpoints. The largest possible ships, as Mortius says, will not be able to do much against heavily fortified planets (since their weapon power hasn't been reduced). Consider this, too: every hit on your ship has a chance to reduce system effectiveness, including weapon effectiveness. Up to 400 enemies are focusing fire on you. But you can only fire on a handful of them at once. Even if your weapons' power is enough to destroy each building's hp 10 times over in a single hit, you're limited to reducing their weapons output by 1/400th. You can never do more than that in one shot, no matter how big your gun is. Meanwhile, you could be losing huge chunks of your own capability every second. Defence now seems to have an unreasonable advantage, particularly since the game encourages small numbers of ships while not discouraging vast numbers of weapons bases. And that's on top of the defensive space station, which can have the same hull volume as you, but doesn't have to waste much on fuel, engines or ftl.
A flat 10x reduction also worries me. The smallest starter ships were already made of tissue and are probably too weak to small-arms fire now. If there must be a reduction (which I'm not sure of), perhaps make it non-linear? Even a slight buff to shuttle-sized ships?
As Vwhatgoes says, certain players already have 4+ billion hp ships in play. That's not going to be very fair, one way or the other - especially since they can be infinitely recalled, and recalling now takes only a fraction of the time it did when they were designed. Most grandfather clauses rely on their exceptions not being endlessly reincarnated! We might have coped with one, but we would have been a little disconcerted if the Bismarck had popped up again the following Tuesday. My old battleships could kill a new Q255, max-armour & max volume ship in just four shots, if the dice are with them.
In Star Trek the balance always seems to be that, faced with an overwhelming enemy, you can take about 4/5 hits before shields go down, 3/4 hits after that till you die. Just from a narrative point-of-view, that feels about right. Good tension. Might be a reasonable baseline? E.g., no capital ship should be one-shotted. Biggest weapon in the game should kill you in c.10 hits? That's time enough to warp if you're quick; but it wouldn't be easy and you might take a critical or disabling hit first. It's really hard to know how much shields will help without knowing their recharge rate.
An idea:
Dedicated anti-planet weapons. Perhaps a ship can use the planet's predictable movement and gravity to use ultra-long range explosives against it. Such a ship would be able to sit out of reach of orbital defences and bomb them down. But it would be a very slow process, perhaps taking several days for a moderate-sized defence base, and a great deal of hull volume would have to be used to make the weapon effective. If defending fleets arrived in time, the bombardment ship would not have the right weapons to defeat them - it would be outfought in every way. So, ordinary ships would have trouble with planets: invasion would have to be a deliberate and dedicated affair: you couldn't just run around in your personal flagship conquering everything. But when you did put in that dedication, you'd have a reasonable chance. Such a division between bomb-ketches and ships-of-the-line might add an interesting layer to war play. It might incidentally alleviate the problem of being invaded while you're asleep or at work. Ordinary ships might have to defeat any space stations before your bombards could move in.
EDIT: Ikkir made the point that small craft might become more important. If their weapons are beefed up with the update, and if NPCs gain the ability to pilot them, I can see carriers becoming exactly the sort of anti-planet weapon I describe - the mothership stays out of range. More fun too. But in that case, it would still be nice if carrier ships had some sort of trade-off against direct firepower. Perhaps you have to allocate significant volume to support facilities for each flight crew; which would still allow you to have as many vehicles as you like for personal use (as is currently the case).