Alot of people have mentioned shields, ion cannons, "systems" and repairs.

Ion cannons effect only shields and systems, once the shields are dwon theres only a few shots till systems are down as well. Everyone know that already, so moving on... 

On a transport,  could there be multiple repair areas, eg: if your sheilds get dropped by too many ion blasts, you go to a certain panel and repair, only the shields get repaired, or your systems took some damage after your shields dropped, and you've stopped dead in space, you head to the system console and start repairing, get systems up, head over to shields repair.

When one of these (shields/systems) goes down, the corresponding station blows up, doing damage to people close, like if you were atttempting to slow the damage to the systems. Also the shield station could be used to "set shields" to standard, forward, reverse ( dbl front, dbl rear)

it would be a balance and I know someone will say, "but a full pack on engineers will make it indestructable."

Wrong. if you make it so you can only fix the damage when its completely broken, or have the shield "heal" rate as part of the % of damage done. more shield damage, less shield heal. You're not powering up the shields, you're repairing the circuts that DO.

If your ships movement is modified by the systems health, as in the lower the health, the lower the max speed, coupled with a limited amout of fixes for the engineer (ammo for the tool box, u only have so many spare parts) and you've got a nice stressful shipboard situation.

Rebel fighters would do most of this on auto, if a bit slow, cause they get by with a little help from their droids(breaks out into beatles' tribute).

Yah, If I hav my way, I'd have a mexican schoolbus ISD (16 players, 1 vehicle) getting bombed back into the pre-republic, with panels exploding all around, engineers franticly repairing the bridge and endless noobs pulling the kamikaze a wing routine, with laser fight to put Pink Floyd to shame.

ah well back to work