Starship Rules in Star Wars d20

I was creating Star Wars d20 characters yesterday (for no real reason), and thinking about the change in scale between character-level interactions and starship-level interactions. My thoughts on the mechs for the Singularity Campaign come into this as well. Anyway, I think they placed the change in scale at the wrong place.

I think star fighters should probably function much like characters, with many of their characteristics derived from the pilot, and the choices he makes. This then provides scope for the player to juggle things like whether the power plant should direct energy to replenishing the shields, provide additional speed, or rechange the weapons. The pilot skill would cap some of the other skills possible in the fighter, with the starship operation feat giving a simple -4 penalty to hit with fighter weapons and a -4 defense penalty.

The basic notion is that starfighters would basically work like a template that wraps around whatever character happens to be piloting it at the time, providing speed on the starship scale, defense and vitality point bonuses, and additional fixed weapons. However, the ship still works like a character in almost all respects.

These aren't new rules - I swiped them from "Mecha Crusade", one of the d20 mini-games found in Dungeon magazine. I don't have original thoughts, I just put things together in new ways :-)

Above starfighter level (I'm not quite sure just how far above the change should be made) ships should become single entities with the individuals on board having little impact on the overall impact on the operation of the ship. After all, the silliness of the manual control scene in Insurrection aside, when does a single character in Star Trek make a meaningful change to the capabilities of the Enterprise? (I'm aware that jumping from Wars to Trek in this matter is likely to get me burned at the stake, but I think the analogy is valid.)

The problem with this idea is that PCs on board a capital ship will want to make a meaningful contribution to starship combat. Additionally, you there are probably problems when dealing with objects on both scales at the same time.