Reducing hitpoints is another step backward. We'll reach the point where it costs 20 million in upgrades to put together a fighter that's essentially weaker in combat than a vanilla VHF in vanilla Freelancer. How it is now in Discovery, we have fighters with more hitpoints and guns that do less damage. It's a very simple equation, we just need weapons to be brought up to balance with armour. It's basic space-fighter engineering, it's not rocket science :0P
While I strongly disagree with nerfing anything to do with fighters, Kerc does have some interesting suggestions. Having armour upgrades occupy weapon slots is a great idea, as is having bigger armour upgrades decrease the agility of your ship. Unfortunately I don't think these two ideas are implementable as they would require modified hard-code, though I could be wrong.
![[Image: flbadger2py9.gif]](http://img215.imageshack.us/img215/1430/flbadger2py9.gif)