Well yes, but that's just a workaround right? In space it doesn't matter if your engines have been disabled, in theory you are still moving at the same velocity you were, then the boarders have to match course and speed, and disabling engines simply doesn't mean a ship is incapable of moving to prevent boarders.
Matching velocity in any close combat scenario where one party loses thrust would be easy. If they were ever in protracted proximity that puts a pretty major limit on their peak relative velocities and a ship with no engines either cannot accelerate, or is limited to much lower acceleration.
What if they use attitude thrusters to start the ship spinning, or just as the boarders are ready to board use emergency over-ride to bust open a hatch and vent atmosphere to send the ship careening in a random direction.
None of that is going to produce multiple-gs of acceleration like firing up the main drives plausibly could. Both the specific impulse and total thrust of cold gas at 1atm or less is pathetic and conventional chemical propellants that might work for maneuvering when the main engines are out won't be much better.
The space shuttle orbiter has a lot of internal volume taken up by it's OCM/RSC thrusters and associated propellant and cannot generate anywhere close to a single g of acceleration with them; burning it's entire propellant reserve also isn't enough for even a single km/s total delta-v. Explosive decompression of the entire habitable area might be able to knock someone over or push them into a wall for a moment, but it wouldn't hurt anyone in a spacesuit (let alone an armored combat version), and that could only be done once. It could probably spin itself pretty fast, maybe even in a way that would make latching on difficult or impossible...but that would be counterproductive; if your ship is screwed, your best hope of survival
is the enemy boarding attemp.
Boarding ships in space is just a throwback to the good old pirate days of sailing ships and grappling hooks.
It's not any more implausible than manned smallish ships existing at all.
And then of course there's the old self destruct, you are going to die anyway, the pirates are getting the goods, as soon as they board blow the ship, and hopefully take the enemy ship with you.
Death wouldn't be certain unless the ship is already in a condition that it's not worth trying to board and the attacker wants to ensure there are no witnesses. Fighting off a boarding attempt while trying to get engines and/or weapons back online makes as much sense as anything, as does trying for a reversal where you get your people on the attacker's ship to disable or capture it...a counter boarding action is probably the best chance one has when one's vessel has already been disabled. Most people, I imagine, would also take their chances in personal combat, or as hostages to be ransomed off, rather than die in an attempt take their opponents with them...and a ship so disabled as to be able to be boarded probably doesn't have much in the way of reliable self-destruct options left either. To use the Starfield example, helium-3 is pretty damned inert (outside of a working fusion reactor or grav drive), so unless the vessel has a dedicated self-destruct system powerful enough to ensure the loss of a nearby vessel (which sounds like an enormous safety and security risk), about the only thing that could even be done to damage the attacking vessel would be to detonate one's own ordianace, which likely isn't in the crew compartments and probably isn't on weapon systems that still work (otherwise they would have been used sooner).
Except that maneuvering thrusters are never part of the main drive system on any ship, that would be silly indeed, because to make a minor course correction you would need to fire up your main thrusters. This is why in FA off you can change the orientation of the ship without changing the direction of travel, because the two are entirely different systems, it would make zero sense to use the same system. It's only full stop in ED if you aren't using FA off, you keep drifting along with FA off even if your engines are gone, which is why people keep asking for grappling hooks or tractor beams to stop ships moving.
In Elite: Dangerous, you lose your engines you lose your thrusters.
This makes perfect sense in the Elite, and many other settings, even some pretty hard sci-fi ones, because the only way to make efficient use of one's fuel is with a fantasically high specific impulse drive system, which probably means at least fusion power, if not something even better.
No doubt there are backups, but since they'd need many orders of magnitude more propellant to move the ship the same amount, they wouldn't be used if the main engine is in working order, unless one is worried about damaging nearby objects, because they'd be so inefficient. They also aren't likely to be powerful enough to stop a ship that does have working main-engine-powered thrusters from matching any evasive manuver, and structual strength of the docking hardware permitting, completely negating any weak chemical or cold-gas thruster system.
