[Drogoth]

What's the point of this "big hard ship blockade" thing? All the enemy has to do is not attack it.

And when they have the same ships? Ideally tougher ships would have to be engaged by capships of equal strength, but refusing to engage isn't always an option.

The Lucifer when it jumped to Vasuda Prime. Should we have told the Vasudans "all you have to do is not attack it and it will be all good". Ships must be eliminated before they eliminate you.

[-Norbert-]

Your argument has merit only if the ship is very tough AND has good firepower, which we weren't discussing ("Big ships with very heavy armour, but little weaponry"). If you build one ship that can take massive damage but dish next to nothing out, the enemy will just leave it for last, since it's no real threat and concentrate on the ships with the real firepower.

And you can't even use such a "tank" to shield any low health, high firepower ships, since that would block their shot at the enemy just as much as the other way round.
It could work to some degree with something like the Narayana in BP2, since it shoots it's torpedoes out to the side, before they turn towards the enemy.

The only sensible way to use such blockers would be to buy time, either for a retreat or so the strike craft can take out the enemy heavy weapons.

[BengalTiger]

Unless the firepower ship has it's turrets in big towers- the shield ship could be between the enemy fleet and the firepower ship, and the firepower ship could have everything but it's turrets hidden.

On the other hand, I'd personally connect both ships (either by permanent docking or making the shield a subsystem with a "carry no damage" flag), and delete the shield ship's engines and subspace drive to save cash.

A ship docked with multiple shield units covering most of it's hull would be pretty cool.

[Marcov]

Hmm...the big, hard ship can actually have a use.

Well, suppose a Shivan Demon is beaming a large, important ship to death, the "tank" ship will jump in between them to buy the victim some time to escape.

Then again, the Tank ship will only be limited to such situations.