Ramming is useless, and while I get that making ramming useful is a bad idea, as is its a bit too much of a free action. Here's my thoughts:
Shields; deals energy damage. Nothing special, no chance of it being particularly effective-- kind of the point of a shield.
Armor; deals kinetic damage. With defeated shields doubled damage to shields upon impact would help make a ramming maneuver at least mildly useful in a even fight but not useful against someone more powerful or someone with defeated shields.
Bare Hull; deals high explosive. Taking damage to hull is shown as explosions, and it'd make sense that the irregularities of internal structure would work at ripping armor breaches open (at the cost of your own ship's integrity), and it would give a defeated ship a way of dealing a blow against an enemy that does more against a foe who has taken less damage in the encounter (has intact armor to be lost in a bare-hull tam, leaving it open to frag and energy damage being a bigger threat) but less against enemies who just defeated you in a fair fight and lost armor in the process.
And here's the suprise-- Phase cloaks; deals frag damage. Having a phase ship uncloak inside of a ship shouldn't do nothing but also shouldn't be a free kill. I've tried this before; unphasing an enemy to death is NOT worth it. Being physically inside of a dying ship is crippling on it's own, so to make phase ships a little more dangerous in a direct, face to face way, make them able to put out some frag damage at the cost of their own armor and safety, and make up a bit for high-tech ships having so few frag options.
Oh, and make phase cloaks colliding overload both ships, forcing them to unphase into each other, naturally damaging the hull of the weaker ship while crippling the armor of the more intact ship. Oh and make forcing a phase overload also inflict a phase coil blow-up, which leaves the ship stuck with it's coils spun up in the cooldown stage until it can reach a 0 Flux boost again, temporarily turning high-tech phase ships into low tech shield-less ships, and also giving phase ships a unique opportunity to have a chance to go into a face-to-face assault. Strike ships would be able to make interesting choices about how to recover from being dragged back into real space like whether or not to vent immediately and try to phase away while their enemy is stuck still in blow-out mode, or to unload their strike ordnance into the enemy's face in hopes to cripple them so they can vent safely.
And it would birth a new subclass of ships; phase interceptors, with high speed, high armor and a Flux inefficient assault load out made to run down and then overpower phase strike ships. Plus it would make modded ships and some of the mildly bugged ships (which can use their special attacks phased) counterable and thus less of a game-breaking bug than a unique obstacle to overcome
