The weapon damage and armour cells make it feel like you're being shot where it looks like you're being shot.
The next stage of this is to make the ship blow up for a reason other than 'ran out of HP.' Did you breach the reactor? Did you sever too many conduits?
I have no idea how difficult this would be to hack in. But it would be pretty cool if you could disable specific subsystems by breaching the armour at specific places. Say 1 or 2 specific hull systems on a frigate and 4 or so on a capital. You can flame out the engines, but if you breach the armour, you can actually destroy them, or at least cripple them. The ammo locker would have explosions. The reactor location would also explode after too much damage, doing a bit of bonus damage. That kind of thing.
This would make it feel like the art for the ships wasn't just an abstraction, but indicated where various hull features were.
As a bonus, this would create a real purpose for the automated repair unit. It could repair the HP of the hull components independently, so that as long as you don't take too much of a burst, your ship won't ever suffer more than it does now.
