Another suggestion to add
Its a good idea to test your ships as rigorously as you can. One such test is damage control. select a ship to test and spawn 2 of them in creative mode, set one to neutral team. On the neutral ship, decide what portion of the ship you want to test (or you can just test the entire ship at once, but have more results and such to watch for at once in testing)
To test, take the second ship and make it target the neutral ship in the portion you want to test on (or target the entire ship if you want). Now slow down the game as much as you want, observe how the effectively the crews fight the fires, which reactors/factories/ammo storages/etc need more protection, which structures are crippled/destroyed from certain explosions
the goal of this test is to determine the effectiveness of the ship's defences (how long they can last under varying combat conditions) and how well the crews tend to react to damage. The test can be modified with different attacking ships depending on how devastating you want the damage to be and for varying conditions. The reason I suggest using the same ship to attack another of itself is so that, at the same time, you can test crew efficiency of the guns and how well the crews can maintain sending firepower down range for long durations of time. with the results of the test, modify your chosen (targeted) ship accordingly. I highly recommend running the test several times as there is always some variations between each combat condition, even if you are testing under the same conditions over and over again
Alternatively, a more simple version of a destruction test is to select certain factories/ammo storages/reactors and set them to simply self destruct. This does show how well crews will fight fires, but is not as nearly as accurate as the other test as a fighting condition usually results in additional damage/fires, loss of crew and loss of fire extinguishers