Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Explosions in space are much less damaging, since the shockwave has a really hard time spreading through vacuum, and the ejection mechanism that ejects the pod from the exploding ship hurls it some distance so the majority of the shockwave doesn't even reach it. Plus the shields on the pod power up and deflect what little does. However, inside the ship, when its shields are down and the mercs can place a couple of shaped charges right up against the skin and have hypervelocity molten jets of metal pierce it, things are looking less and less good for your pod.

The goal isn't to destroy your ship, the goal is to make a small opening, with as little collateral damage as possible (because if you do succeed in taking the ship for your own, you'll want to repair it from, say, 30% armor damage (both your cut and battle damage), instead of 90%). That said, the boarding pod's engine would be right up close against the ship's hull, so the plasma stream would not have time to disperse and cool, and the entire engine output would be focused onto a small circular area, about 1,5-2 meters in diameter. I could compare the overall projected effect to holding a plasma cutter against an aluminium block: in one word, "whooosh".

Lastly, I wasn't saying you shouldn't be able to defend your ship. Quite the contrary, even smaller ships likely have formidable internal defenses, both static (turrets), and mobile (defense drones), and possibly even weapon caches for the crew to arm themselves in case of such an event.
As for preventing the pods from ever reaching your ship, maybe you could smartbomb them, or install some sort of flak cannon like turret, which autotargets boarding pods and drones and engages automatically, but cannot be fired on anything else.

You never made a point about free repairs in owned stations (or outposts), though.
But like I said, these little guys do damage in a small area, to the effect of less then 0,01HP, if you will. Such a boarding will by no means destroy your ship like a doomsday hit, but will merely be like a pinprick on your finger: just a gateway inside.
Which, by the way, also explains its effectiveness: focus. Think sunlight: diffuse sunlight will only make you narrow your eyes, or maybe take off your sweater; focus it into a small dot, and you can light matches with it. Take the example further, and you get solar-powered furnaces and power plants melting rock salt for heat storage. So while a thermal warhead generates a highly energetic omnidirectional pulse, the constant output of a drive focused into a two-meter circle will likely be infinitely more damaging, simply due to energy density.

If you want a way to directly combat the boarders, feel free to assist CCP in implementing fully manual aiming of guns and expand that to cover a multitude of turrets on the inside as well. Without having inside access to the codebase, I can already tell you that this is nigh-impossible both code-wise and and hardware-wise (due to the immense overhead the manyfold expansion generates).
As for their EHP, I imagined at first that they would be tanked on the order of fighters, but after seeing the EHP of fighters and fighter-bombers, I'm beginning to digress: these pods should be basically ammunition, disposable, mass-produced vehicles to deliver a squad to their target, with just enough power generation to power the drive (and the resulting plasma torch), and barely any armor over what holds the atmosphere and the systems together. Therefore a smartbomb shouldn't have any problems sweeping them away.

But despite your raging against such infinitesimal details, these are still not the major problems, and despite what you're saying, I did not advocate this mechanic. Read my first post here carefully: it talks about the many, many hurdles such a mechanic would face, including, but not limited to the fact that if the pilot activated a self-destruct, the squad would have an almost-zero chance of reaching the pod bay and destroying/ejecting the pod before its end. The rest is effectively fluff, meaningless bickering while missing the much greater points.
Call me slow, but I'm starting to suspect you're doing this on purpose...