Crew losses in a pitched battle where both sides are building fighters as fast as they can... might get kinda absurd. Skills to reduce casualties from fighter squadrons would be a good idea.
I think a feature that would be extremely nice is to have a random delay between a fighter craft being steamrolled and its actual explosion (assuming it wasn't actually just disabled). In this brief delay, escape pods for each of the fighter's crew will launch. The higher the player's "Fighter Tactics" skill, the faster any fighters in his fleet will eject, giving greater odds that they manage to beat the explosion and get out alive.
Unlike many of the "glitz" features, these escape pods would actually be meaningful. There would be [edit]three[/edit] forms:
1) Vacsuits : The simplest possible. Throw on your pressure helmet (you *are* already wearing a spacesuit if you're going to be in combat in an environment that will be fatal to you, don't be silly) and let the gentle flow of outgassing carry you out into the inky black (read: violent decompression sucking you out of the fissures in the hull). Odds of successfully making it out of the wreckage with an intact pressure suit are low, but better than nothing, and once you're floating there you've got all the time in the world to wait. Or about 5 hours or so, anyway. You're so negligibly small that projectiles will completely miss you -- only the greatest gunner in the universe could ever hope to potshot a floating body at a few kilometres of distance.
2) Ejector Pods : These are simply floating escape capsules. If they survive the battle *and* they belong to the side of the victor, they are successfully rescued. They have a *tiny* collision box (as close to one pixel as possible). They have a small survivability to avoid any errant beam weapons, but most any form of projectile would finish them off; however, due to their small size they are extremely effective at lidar absorption and deflection, and therefore can't be auto-targetted, meaning that it would generally take a wilful act to kill them unless they were unfortunately caught in the middle of a firing solution between two capital ships. Manoeuvring thrusters that make them automatically dodge out of harm's way would also be interesting, although that might be getting into too much CPU processing for a smaller feature.
3) Escape Pods : These are the advanced versions found on higher-tier fighters. They would be ultra-fast (300+ speed) self-manoeuvring pods that navigate back to the nearest flight deck (if one still survives) and dock with it. If an escape pod successfully manages to dock with a ship, that crewman is no longer a casualty... period. They will survive the battle unless the ship that is carrying them is killed off too. Per Wyvern's other suggestions, they could also even immediately launch to fly another fighter, although that's a little more iffy -- in reality if you're shot down you have to clear a medical check before being cleared to fly again, but on the other hand things might get streamlined a bit
in the middle of a battle, so it could go either way in the fictional universe. ;-) In any case, if there is no remaining flight deck to dock with, they simply try to disengage from the battlefield, and behave as ejector pods in this case -- the winning side gets to claim them as rescues.
In the .ship definition, the user could specify which ships include ejector pods and which ships include escape pods. In the default game they would exist only for fighters and bombers, but the idea could just as easily port over to larger ships.
I think a "prisoners" personnel type might be interesting as well. Whoever holds the field after battle can capture the remaining enemy personnel in escape pods as prisoners, who would be tied to the faction of origin. Prisoners could then be dropped off at their own faction base (your enemy) for a high reward (to cover the circumstances of prisoner exchange, ransom, and humanitarian incentive) or an enemy faction base (your ally) for a slightly lower reward (with the assumption being that they're collected for processing, interrogation, and then prisoner exchange back to their home faction).
There's nothing stopping you from simply making use of that Jettison feature on the cargo screen... who's to know?
[edit]Added the lowest-tech form of ejection in the world. =)
