How about this? When I was exploring, I went into the cloud in the north part of Newcastle, I got massive control issues, my ship wouldn't respond quickly or well to the steering inputs from my mouse, and I was terrified that I would fly straight into the mines. As it was happening, I was sure that this was some feature of the cloud, a really unique and dangerous navigational hazard.
Why not reproduce this in weapon form? Call it "shorting out their control systems" or something, and have it be progressively more effective with each continued hit, until they have no steering anymore, just engines, thrusters, and strafing. Make it a class 9 gun with slow refire and large energy draw, and have it only be effective if it hits the hull, so you need to take down their shield first.
