Shields are required on ships not only to protect them against lasers and missiles but also against "small impacting objects" like micro meteorites... bits of debris from all those other ships you just destroyed..
In XBFT the teladi ship gives you a 1MW shield as without it you were going to die.
Now when you capture a ship in XT as often as not it has no shields. But unless a pirate takes a pot shot you can fly it any number of sectors without shields and nothing bad will ever happen to it.
What I would like to see is an element of chance that yes you can capture ships but unless you transport a shield to it then it has a very real chance of being destroyed by these small objects. Not that they have to be actually flying through space, just that the software recognises a ship without shields and by random occurance determines that its been hit by something either causing more damage or ultimately destroying the ship...
