I agree that the current shields are an unnecessary pain. You pay dearly in terms of recharger blocks and power cost for relatively small increases in radius, and then the bulk of the "volume" gained is completely wasted. The current system makes a very narrow range of structure configurations META.
The lack of an ability to shape the shield coverage projection seriously stifles creativity. What is particularly irritating is that it only took me a half hour of tinkering in creative mode to notice this... Why should anyone have to point out such an obvious flaw in an update that they worked on for so long?
For my part, I really think that we should be able add a displacement vector, or even give the coverage a tear-drop shape with displacement. We could still pay for the over-all volume of the projection at the same rate as we do now. Just give us the ability to actually use the bulk of that volume, because right now a very large portion of ship designs cannot get a fair coverage compared to the number of shield blocks and power.
