Boarders, perhaps. I've found that turning it the other way works best - Get a boarding party of your own, because taking a ship intact yields way more scrap.

Quite, boarders :)

I think I rushed forward far too quickly and ended up in a universe where I was outclassed and then had a little oxygen related mishap and it all went downhill from there!

Yeah, when the proverbial shit starts hitting the fan, it's hard to recover.

I re-discovered that after unlocking the Adjudicator realizing ships with L2 shields were completely immune to my firepower