btw. I can add an mesh collider to every mesh on my scene which detects collisions on every mesh individually in unity
Show off!

I may ditch the custom ships for the sake of simplicity now, it gets very confusing (even with just three parts per ship on the test model). I can always swap the mesh to a damaged one (like in Wipeout HD when a ship explodes) and have particle emitters etc for smoke.

This also means the scripting will be simpler to do, which is always nice!