There are a lot of balance issues involved. For starters, simply halving the bats/bots will cripple low level ships, especially in singleplayer where NPC's have deadly sharp aim and accidentally brushing some debris will halve your hull almost instantly. Also, if you remove or reduce universal armour, Vanilla ships become one-hit-killable with explosives again while custom ships do not. I agree fighters should die quicker but I don't agree the solution is to weaken them as they are already pretty well balanced against capships in my opinion.