Just to see how much easier is to kill ships without engineer help, i didn't get bi-weave shields at founders world and was too lazy to play with thrusters and other modules to save some power for my shields so i had only 467 MJ shield, also didn't buy any hull reinforcements and kept lightweight armor - only 288 armor points, there is plenty of room for improvement even without mods.
Of course it's harder without special abilities and upgrades but it's not that bad.
(c) Frontier
![](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/8MoJ7EaO7nI/maxresdefault.jpg)