What about a new module called something like "armour repair", that basically slowly (or I do not know, very slowly, also scaling with the tech) repairs the ship's armour in the space whenever it gets damaged improving the survaibility of the ship in battle.
To justify this, I recall some sci-fi movies where thousands of tiny repair drones are stored in the ship and enter in function externally to repair the ship's layers after the battle giving time and chance to reach a shypyard.
How is this any different from shields in practical terms? Since armor is far more space-efficient than shields, I fear the net impact of this module would be to make it an auto-include over shields beyond a certain ship size/cost. Possibly this can be balanced by, e.g., consuming MSP to do the repairs (although that seems a little bit odd since armor is made up of known minerals), but it seems thorny to me.
The shield is the energy layer around the armour, the armour is the phisical layer that "make" the ship, this is how I intend both concepts.
You can damage the shield component or disharge it in battle and then starting hitting the armour.
After that I find odd that a spaceship does not have something that can, I repeat slowly, repair the armour before reaching a base.
The MSP consumption might be a good compromise to counter-balance this.
Also, the AI will benefit of this improving survival chances of its ships.
