And if you don't care about realism or anything, but want to go full space opera, then the best looking 'sploshuns, shields and whatnot in a space game were featured in Haegemonia.
Some love for Haegemonia.
TBH I never realy liked Haegemonia. Gameplay was pretty shit and lacked depth - you had about four different combat units differing only in "weight class", they had subvariants depending on type of weapon used but that mostly depended on which weapon tree you decided to invest in so it didn't really broaden your options.
Then you had cheese like fortifying wormholes with space stations and enjoying fireworks and free scrap whenever enemy tried to warp into the system. Economy mostly boiled down to micromanaging space taxes, maybe some space mining or salvaging so it was meh too. Spying was almost fun.
Apart from that, most ships suffered from typical Sci-Fi design (it doesn't have to even try to make sense as long as it has a cool shape and a lot of cool looking shit sticking out) and everything was hopelessly out of scale, both spatially and temporally - solar systems were the size of closet, ships almost the size of planets, planetary bombardments took almost the same amount of time as increasing population from "barely settled" to "planetwide city", there were fixed plot characters living for countless generations while citizens below multiplied and died like fucking
rabbits bacteria and so on.
BUT:
Man, was this game gorgeous. It looked like a fucking space opera movie and not a low budget one either. Shield bubbles flashed and shimmered under weapon fire, ship sections breaking off and blowing up in showers of multicoloured explosions and debris, some projectiles burst right through shields creating circular shockwaves in the bubble, majestic (as long as you didn't move camera around to show the actual scale
) planets of various types spun slowly below, shrouded with clouds, with lakes and seas reflecting sunlight, or magma oceans glowing through fractured crust. If there was even a tiny bit of a graphics whore in you this game would bring it up to the surface.
Music was pretty monocle too.
tl;dr
Best interactive screensaver ever.
Since this is not a space sim like Star Citizen, but a arcade stuff, I doubt we will have a detailed damage modell.
I think it was more about visual representation of damage than actual damage model.
Take UT3, for example. It has simplistic HP mechanics for both players and vehicles, but when the vehicles get damaged their models get increasingly fucked up.
Of course I like my detailed damage models because they greatly improve the gameplay, so yeah.
