Less mass so... less sturdy? Maybe?

Not how physics work bud.

I only drop this post entry because we had a similar discussion on a recent thread: Regarding whether more players feel they lost DS's due to loss of EHP, or more felt they lost the ship due to listing and displacement from the impact.

Out of the debate came a (unconfirmed) finding, that the players who had accumulated enough BONUS to shield/armour by grinding higher and higher vehicle upgrade skill levels... DID NOT get rocked when your DS is hit with even the proto-blasts. We might lose all shield and half the armour in a single blast, but the DS wouldn't stagger or lose it's position very much at all, as if the enemy fire doesn't mean JACK to your vehicle anymore---it's now got MUSCLE.

It doesn't happen overnight, and doesn't happen with regular modules alone---it's somewhere between the mix of the modules + those % bonuses from your Skill-ing up that seemed to make the "impact jolt" go away.

Like I said, we couldn't confirm that was the actual reason---but we CAN confirm that some players' beefed up DS's get ROCKED by the punch, and some players' beefed up DS's just twitch and shrug it off.