What would be of interest for me is does the surface shield work for someone?
As said I tested it and I only got the shieldhit sound but no visible effect.
That (and damaging the shields instead of the hull) is exactly what should happen. Bobb was going to use the decal code to render shield effects, but AFAIK he never got around to it, and the decal code isn't really working atm.
The biggest issue I see with shields taking collision damage is that I think the reason that collision damage isn't dealt to damage is because ships never collide with them. The collision checks for ships are only done for the hull, not the shields, so the collision point is located on the hull. Of course that theory may be complete BS, I don't fully understand that part of the code

But regardless, the code would have to be modified to handle colliding with shield quadrants that were still there.