[Paladin]

Actually, you have a nice Shields/Hit points meter on the right panel, righ over the weapons readout of your selected ship...

The little bars burn up as you deplete shields and hit points... (I think it's blue for shileds and red for hit pts). Either way, just right-click on any ship to have every info you might need (including "surprise" components... ;-)

What I'd like to see is a similar thing to see how much each ennemy ship is damaged at a glance...


------(other subject)---------
For the cristalline armor bug, its not really regeneration, only shield regeneration...
From what I read on the armor's description, it would mean that shield traversing weapons would still have 5,10 or 15 dmgpts channeled to the shields, or something like if the armor gets hit, some damage is channeled back to the shields...
But in this case, I got a ship with 2 cryst.ArmorII, so it seems 20 shields points are regenerated each hit, 5 more than the 15 pts of damage from the already powerfull Shard cannon... So I could theorically recharge my own ship's shields that way, by firing on them with less powerfull weapons...
So that only the real big guns could be a possible nuisance this way (or the shield-skipping guns...)

I sincerelly hope this is a bug, or else this is all too cheesy, or impossible (depending on the side of the Crystalline Advanced Tech you are).