STA3 has this.
I was thinking it might be possible to make a unique debris for each ship that is just the ship model. That would prevent the game from filling up with solid entities, and it wouldn't require any new models to be loaded.
Do remember if you want to do any texture changes at all, or even remove say the da texture, that requires a new mesh, even if it's the same barring that simple change. I'm pretty sure that would result in a new model being loaded in. That being said, I believe a better route to go would be to make two debris models that use the regular ship's textures, plus perhaps a generic fire/charred hull texture that's standard among all ship debris.
