I'm asking because now that pirates (both regular and anomaly) have beam weapons, it appears that anomaly pirates will chew up the initial survey ship for dinner.  25 hps per ship and having to fighting through three of them can leave the survey ship something of a sitting duck.  IIRC, when the initial survey ship was given attack and defense, pirates attacked with mass driver weapons, so it made sense for the survey ship to have armor.  But now they can be taking enormous amounts of damage, making it so a player can really only survey one pirate defended asteroid before having to wait about 70 turns before looking at another one.

Doing some testing under the latest beta patch, my initial survey ship took:

88 points of damage

80 points of damage

88 points of damage

96 points of damage (!!!)

80 points of damage

100 points of damage (!!!) [last pirate had 13 hp left]

I'm not saying they should be able to scan these easily. Even taking (on average) 30 to 50 points of damage would be better than what looks to be the current 80 to 100.  And I also understand the concern about not wanting survey ships being able to run around and play Pirate Suppression Duty at the beginning of the game (though if they ain't scanning anomalies and are instead Pirate Hunting, that's a trade off right then and there).  But at the same time, they were given weapons and defenses so they could scan the occasional asteroid before having to lick their wounds.

I don't know how much those shields would actually help, since they get degraded in fights.  But it'd be better than what amounts to nothing, I would think.