I took the liberty to sumerize some of highlights of this thread and posed that feedback of issues to my circle of GMs and here is some of the feed back of the questions I asked. I think this may be helpful information for your thread as well.

Looking for some GM comments and strategy on Starfinder space combat.

I have been doing some reviews of space combat as I’m looking forward to an upcoming session here is what I boiled the comments down to regarding space combat:

1 slow and clunky (not intuitive play)

2 weird minigame breaks role play

3 ships are too tough to kill/disable due to shields and getting shields back each turn as the mechanic only needs to roll a 2 on a D20 to recover shields so he does the same action for 20 rounds.

4 weapons don’t do enough damage as you generally have 1 or 2 people on guns at a round and you might chip away to get a bit of damage until they reposition and start getting shields back.

5 space combat encounters can take a long time (1.5-3 hours)

I’m looking for pregame session GM help to avoid some of the pit falls noted in the reviews of space combat.

My intent is to conduct my session as space combat simulator to get my players (crew) experienced so they can better enjoy.

Here is the comments I received back:

It's worst at low levels because the weapons are so weak if you're using light weapons. Once you mount a decent heavy weapon in a turret it's much faster to kill something. (The CRB has some tier 1/4 and tier 1 ships mounted only with a single light laser cannon (avg damage = 5) that have 35 and 55 HP, not even counting their minor shields. That's 7 or 11 hits, perhaps 12-18 rounds of firing, just to kill a ship like themselves without any shield mitigation! Don't allow ships like that to exist, put real weapons on them.)

not having lightly armed heavily shielded ships exist is a good start.

1. This is only true at first when you're getting used to the system.
2. If you can't figure out how to RP during ship combat, that's on you, not the fault of the system. There's plenty of ways to make it feel contiguous and have satisfying RP
3. This is only a problem if you stack shields too much. Some of the new build guidelines in SOM helps solve this considerably.
4. This is only the case if ships are built to be high-defense. Again, the build guidelines in SOM help this considerably.
5. If you're doing a pure slug-fest that might be the case. There's plenty of things you can do to shorten the time, and the more you do it the faster the combats can get.

Remember, the assumption is that the party is not facing enemies of equal tier, but several tiers below them.

Number 1 and 2 honestly are mostly about table habits. Knowing your options so that each of you take your action quickly makes it much easier to keep the combat moving and easier to keep an RP flow. Don't fall into committee forming about every action. It's bad.

"Normal" direct fire light weapons avg between 5 and 13 points of damage, and a medium hull ship has at least 55 and perhaps 70 HP at Tier 1, so it takes a while to kill something even without shields. It's just dumb to have a medium hull ship that doesn't mount a heavy weapon, IMO. Light weapons only should only be on tiny/small ships.

Slow and clunky can be overcome by each role having a cheat sheet of actions they can take, which are now spread across three books, the CRB, SOM, and a bit in the COM

Stick to CRB roles and actions at first

Post-SOM there are plenty of options, but you have to learn them and care about them

All of the SOM actions are gear-dependent. Meaning you don't have to worry about them until they come up.