OTOH, while described as the same technology, screens in the MgT version of 2300AD work differently. Old military are rated at 1-6 and new military as 3-8, but rather than acting as a saving throw it acts as hull armor, reducing damage, but screens are applied before hull armor to an incoming attack. Screens are ablative, but rating is reduced whether or not the screen stops the attack. Additionally, the screen components include only six reloads, to replace vaporized metal strips. Once out of reloads, the screen does not refresh/
The only power requirement is that if screens are up, either stutterwarp speed is reduced by 10% or energy weapons cannot be fired.
That's understandable. Colin and co. when adapting 2300 for MongTrav likely wanted to address a lot of the messy / incomplete / poorly playtested rules from 2300 and clean them up to make a more playable game.
While I'm not a big fan of simplified power allocation system you describe as occurring, I can see why they did it for the purposes of keeping the system simple. In old school 2300, you could use screens at a lower power setting as well - the screen rating given was if it was running at max power. You could run it at a lower power rating to free up power for other purposes.
And certainly, if the penalties are "just" that, I don't see why every ship doesn't have screens. In fact, I'd say that since a layer of thin metal strips could act similarly to "folding Whippet Shields" - perhaps all ships in 2300 carry low power screens to act as debris shields instead of installing of braced and heavy armor against micrometeors, and controlling mass is very important in a universe where anti-gravity doesn't exist and a lot of ships don't use fusion power.
Ypres-class frigate
At half the mass of the Bismark battlecruiser and six times the mass of the Orage-class frigate, I think the Ypres is more accurately a light cruiser. I suppose it could be considered a frigate compared to the Richelieu, but the Ypres is 30 years older and very few were built.
The Ypres turned into this Frankenstein's monster because of the way GDW decided to apply the idea "hit points" to starships. In "aulden dayes" of GDW 2300, the larger the hull, the greater the mass of the hull. If you added armor to the hull, the amount of armor determined the multiplier that was applied to the mass of the hull. I'm leaving factors out like the nature of the material used to make the hull and so on, but this is the basic gist of the system. This meant that even a small ship with a higher armor value (eg; the Martel) had a stupid number of hit points. A medium-size ship with a decent armor value resulted in a ridiculous number of hull hit points. Instead of examining and rewriting this mechanic for playability, GDW seemed to have collectively shrugged and decided ship out the rules anyway with the crude fix that the additional ship sheets just to show hull hits was dumb (they were right) and ignored the multiple pages (iirc it was like five or six when I figured it out) of tiny box hull hits that Armor 9 or 10 Kafer Alphas should have, the 2-3 the Bismarck should have and so on and just consolidated it to one page.
The idea of hit points on a ship being basically a 1:1 relation to the mass of the hull is easy but lazy - as game designers being paid to make a system they should have realized it was also fairly ridiculous and unplayable. Ships don't take a certain amount of damage then vaporize into a ball of plasma or fragments the size of a grain of sand and cease to exist like in video games where the memory and processing power of computers is limited so they didn't want to continue to track dead hulls so everything just exploded and ceased to exist.
It takes a huge amount of overkill power to do this, and maybe not even then - even a 1,000 pound bomb dropped onto a car is likely to leave enough twisted bits of wreckage that is still recognizable as once having been a car. Similarly, seagoing warships that "exploded" during war vanished because they sank into the water, not because they exploded into a halo of hot plasma and tiny fragments - Paul Allen has been proving this lately beyond a shadow of a doubt. GDW's ship hit points basically represented the amount of kill power you'd need to pulverize a ship into tiny fragments which is why the hit boxes become so pointless so quickly - it was a statistic that really didn't need to be tracked the way it was. If they wanted to go with hit points, great! Track it until some (arbitrary) "mission killed" point where it becomes an unpowered hulk drifting on its last vector - this would be reached a long, long time before the hull vaporized it would sacrifice realism for ease of play (like Dungeons and Dragons has "hit points"). Or go with some system where you track subsystem damage for greater granularity. GDW went with the latter ... yet for some reason kept the hull hit system which was largely superfluous at that point in original 2300 and Star Cruiser.
