One humble suggestion:
Randomly-spawned capship explosions, ranging from just breaking apart and drifting(would probably have to rig lightmaps to go dark during the animation), to breaking apart with the reactor going critical(shockwave spawned from that section, with a great many hunks of shrapnel(sort of like asteroids?), to the reactor going *bang* in the first place...
the first ought to spawn more ejection pods, and the last only a couple(which would probably be fried by the shockwave anyway, if they didn't bail soon enough) perhaps time-based release of ejection pods? say, one every half-second? or.... maybe...
perhaps the SCP could rig the game so ejection pods began spawning at 1% hull... though this would take a bit of a rework of the model, creating "ejection points"...
Sorry, I'm rambling. *kicks himself for drinking and posting*
edit- another idea. Perhaps not random, but SELECTABLE. That way, mission campaigns could involve covering rescue ops in the sealed decks, or maybe later battles wind up near the derilict hulk...
Could be done by assigning explosion animations on a per-ship basis in the tables... and, of course, having an end-result model(and debris models, a la asteroids) for at least the first couple would be a must, for coolness alone...
yet another idea. perhaps the forward weapons and lights(er, lightmaps) going offline, but the aft lights going into an "erratic flicker" for a while, with the aft weapons still being partially online?
another, unrelated idea: downing a capship, or even doing serious harm to it, with small fighter-based weapons(meaning guns/light missiles) is just plain silly. I would think this could be done by souping up the armor, and damage done by torps...
