Hahaha, yeah you're right.
When me and my friend playtested this, our characters already had around 10-12 assets each, with 4 on our ship.
I decided to increase the progress to encourage my mech pilot friend to use Lock On instead of Strike. Another intent was to make fights go faster and perhaps make it feel fast-paced.
It does have a lot of balance problems and using action dice isn't the best idea.
For future iterations I planned to put in a Speed and Distance mechanic which serve as a replacement to action dice. Speed and Distance determine how much progress you mark and also how likely you are to succeed vs. challenge dice. These two are increased or decreased depending on what you choose to do, making it feel like a real dogfight between mechs.
The mechanic posted here overall is proof of concept but honestly I've moved on to other projects.
Me and my friend decided to stay with vanilla Starforged, and I am designing a different RPG.
I do hope Knight Frame inspires somebody because Ironsworn/Starforged has a lot of space for crunchy mechanics that I haven't seen anyone do.