Currently there is no non-scripted way to randomise the armor on a ship. This means that if you want NPC versions of a ship at different levels you need to make entirely new shipclasses inheriting from a base class for every level you want them at. Allowing a table system would allow for smooth swapping between levels and allow for single shipclasses to inherit from the base class and then adapt their setups for the entire range of levels that the ship is intended to appear across.
This would cause issues with shipbrokers relying on a single level for each ship, but I'm putting "fix that" in my big shipbroker request ticket as well.
This is possibly the single thing I want the most for cleaning up how Elemental Shift populates the universe. Currently I've got a lot of duplicate shipclasses using very nice tabled equipment for their shields, armor, weapons, launchers....but they can only be at a single level with a single type of armor. Being able to use nested tables and leveltables for armor as well would make things vastly easier to build and maintain.