[oleg]

Originally posted by Baron Munchausen:
... it's so hard to destroy crystalline armor equipped ships that they are very likely to get the chance to exploit their special weapon.

...

Actually, it is not The idea is a "Sandwich Battery" (copy right by Oleg, 2002 ):

Normally, people put several SD first on ship and then normal weapons, say APB. But when fighting CA, rearrange weapons in this way: SD,APB,SD,APB...
When SD hits ship with CA, it saps shields but shields DO NOT regenerate from damage here.

It leaves CA ship naked to APB hit. Whatever shields are regenerated after APB hit are then removed by SD, etc. CA becomes a basically standard armor !
Notice that you don't even need to waste space using mounts on SD, decent SD with normal mounts take care of 6-9 CAIII

All together you get CA piercing weapon wich is only 30% bigger then large mounted APB (even better on larger ships)