i have a crazy idea...
What if instead of having one ship with various sub objects, we have various ships docked with each other to make 1 ship... think legos. i know it would be a ***** to table and a ***** to fred but.. it might work?
Sorry, but that would actually be even more fiddly to set up than building the main capship out of destroyable subobjects, and having a single ship built out of dozens of others would mean you could fit maybe 4 into the 130 ship limits before running out of slots. You would also cause tons of errors and problems like SEXPing things.
Overall for the effort you'd put into building one complete ship you could have built and released an entire campaign. And you'd probably have lots of bugs left over as well, not to mention it would still not look very good.

Not sure if this would work, but just have the subobjects to be destroyed as "turrets", so a ships could basically be a large hunk of "turrets", and when they are destroyed, the destroy detail texture appears.
As for debris, just have some low poly objects classed as "ships" in the tables, etc. and have them "appear" when a ship is destroyed, or have them there at the start of the mission. Have them non-targetable, or low priority or something so they don't appear in the hostile targeting list.
You can already do the second one - you just need a bit of creative SEXPing and a hulk model ready.
The first one is essentially the same as the standard destroyable subobjects idea, with the added instability of making all those subobjects into turrets, which would mean those subobjects would then BE turrets. (Turrets are just specialised subobjects) There'd be no less effort involved than the standard method of making the entire hull volume destroyable subobjects, so all the cons (no pros

) of that method would all still apply.
Overall there are 3 viable options to improve debris beyond what is already in existance:
1) Make more subsystems physical submodels that can be destroyed (as has been done on the hecate). This method doesn't require much more work, and the localised sections mean it's far less likely to mess up much if any smoothing. It can't easily be applied to existing HTL ships but it could be done on future ones.
(Side note here: Galemp - the reason the hecate didn't have messed up smoothing is mainly because max is FAR better with smoothing than the COB format. You can achieve smoothing in max that far exceeds the messy slop that is COB smoothing. If I were to convert the exact same hecate model with the best smoothing settings I can achieve we'd get bad distortion around the seams of the debris chunks.)
2) Have a line in the ships table for each ship that defined a pof to use as a hulk after the main ship is destroyed, and a flag in FRED for each ship to define if it becomes a hulk or not. Upon destruction there'd be the usual explosion but no debris, and the clipping planes would just move out from the centre of the ship in both directions - without the sections drifting apart though. The hulk would be clipped in at the same points - the transition being covered by the explosion, in exactly the same way the current debris work.
3) Parallax/displacement mapped damage decals.
The fourth viable option would be Geomod, and we all know how soon that will be implemented so don't even think about it.
