Here's another thing I noticed: if you look at the guns mounted on a ship (yours or your enemy's), you can see a little coloured power-bar that either fills up, or starts to glow more intensely, the closer it is to firing. So if you want to know how close your opponent is to getting a shot off, this is something you can pay attention to.

(Some weapons are harder to figure out than others, though - I find that lasers are usually pretty clear as they effectively have a visible 'loading bar', but missiles and beam weapons tend to be a little harder to interpret.)

Zoltan personnel should be put in systems that need power at the time, thus returning usable power to the pool.

Also i noticed a kinda neat tactic. I did not try it yet. Rock crew is immune to fire. So if it is combined with a weapon that causes fire, it can do a lot of system an crew damage, since the crew cant suppress the fire until they fight. And rocks are hardy.

Does fire deal hull damage too? Or just for the systems breaking?

I think that if fire burns in a room long enough, it can eventually cause a hull breach, which may cause a point of hull damage too (I haven't confirmed this). The reason I think this is that I've set some rooms on fire, only to have the fire go out a while later because the oxygen was sucked out by a hull breach, and I hadn't shot any weapons at it in the interim. However, it's possible that the hull breach was caused by the initial weapons fire, and I didn't notice it because the fire icon was sitting on top of it.

***

On an unrelated note, I've been fiddling around with the Stealth Cruiser lately, and last night I managed to beat the boss on Normal with it. Accordingly, here are some tips on how to not die horribly (these are for layout A - haven't tried layout B yet):

First off, you might think that getting shields would be your top priority, but it isn't. They're helpful, but your #1 priority is actually to upgrade your cloak to lv3 as soon as possible. Always keep a crew member at the helm, and try to keep one in the engine room, as having a high evade is this ship's only defense when uncloaked. If you need to pull someone to do repairs, have your weapons officer take care of it.

Here's how to use the Stealth in combat (with the starting equipment): as soon as you enter combat, cloak. This gives your weapons time to charge, and the enemy's weapons will not charge as long as you're cloaked. Once they're charged, target the enemy's weapons with your dual laser, and get ready to target the beam (again, target weapons, plus whatever else you can stretch it over to). As soon as the dual-laser takes the shield down, rake the enemy with the beam. With a bit of luck, you should be able to knock his weapons out of commission before he even gets a shot off. Even if you don't, you should at least be able to knock out one or two of his weapons, so you won't be getting shot up too badly (especially with your 30% evade rate).

I've read some comments in other forums that suggest waiting to cloak until just after the enemy fires their weapons, so that they waste their shot, and you get to recharge your weapons while theirs sit at empty. While it's true that cloaking to avoid a shot can be a good emergency maneuver, I didn't find it to be a very good opening gambit. Usually, the enemy's weapons will be firing out-of-synch with one another, which means that if you cloak to dodge the first shot, you're still going to get hammered by the second one as soon as you decloak. On top of that, you'll often have to cloak just around the point that your weapons are reaching their first full charge, which means that you lose the advantage of powering up while cloaked. In my opinion, it's much better to just cloak immediately and try to cripple their weapons before they get the chance to fire any shots at you.

Finally, if you're lucky enough to stumble across a scrap recovery arm, grab it. This ship burns a lot of scrap on repairs, so having that extra 10% makes a significant difference.

AFAIK fire does not cause breaches nor do hull damage by itself. But if a fire burns down a system completely then it will also cause a small explosion doing 1 hull damage. The same happens when a boarding party destroys a system.