[Suicide Junkie]

if using the emissive idea, conventional weapons would need to do enough extra damage to account for the emmissive armor, but what if it ran up on a ship without the shields? they would do an extra 35 points of damage per shot, or so.

Actually they don't all the weapons would be affected somehow by the ice shield. A plasma stream would waste a small portion of its energy on the ice, and a projectile would take some damage from it as well.

The key is that the weapons which can be blocked by the shield all have reload 1, low damage per hit, and are almost completely absorbed by the EA ability.
The weapons which skip the ice shields do a lot of damage in each shot, with a larger reload. The damage is only reduced by a tiny fraction because the shot is powerful & slow reloading