I'd love to see the shield designs that I came up for Ferrium get used sometime, but they'd require a considerable amount of work to implement.
Basically, the idea was to have two different sets of 'shields' (for Terran ships, there were ideas for other races as well).
One, an EM field surrounding each ship. This 'shield' would operate at a constant power, but would be limited in the number/size of projectiles it could resist. The EM shield could also be of two different types, focused or diffused. Focused would allow the ship to resist large projectiles, by concentrating the EM field in one direction (Hey, this is sci-fi

), while diffuse would be better against a big spread of projectiles. Obviously, nonmetal projectiles would also be effective against ships with an EM shield.
The EM field generators could also be toggled into stealth mode, where they wouldn't do anything to resist projectiles, but they would act to cancel out the ambient EM radiation from the ship's systems and reduce the effectiveness of EM sensors against the craft.
The second shield system mounted on fighters would be a heat sink system embedded into the hull. This would work to diffuse energy beams across the surface, to prevent any one spot on the hull from reaching its melting point. However, a concentrated beam or a beam focused on the same spot for long enough that exceeded the system's capacity to redistribute heat would eventually melt the hull plating.
Like the EM field generators, the heat sink system would also be toggleable between normal mode and a stealth mode. In stealth mode, the ship would attempt to concentrate all heat generated by the craft to a very small cross-section, in order to cool the rest of the hull as much as possible and reduce the effectiveness of IR sensors against the ship.
(On a side note, the technology that I was going to use to explain the advanced EM capabilities of craft was a device called an MFU (Magnetic Focusing Unit), with the capability to create electric/magnetic fields some distance from a craft. I also wanted to use the tech for a capital ship that could use it to grab nearby asteroids and fling them at nearby planets/ships, or create a concentrated magnetic field within the center of a fighter to crush it near-instantaneously, but the idea was vetoed as too unrealistic.

)