It can be hard sometimes, yea. When it's about fighter or even gunboat class sometimes, I say, in RP that the ship was destroyed and pilot either ejected and ran in pod, or status of pilot was unconfirmed, no body found...
About the name of the ship - if I name my boat "Jack" and it sinks in a storm, I see no problems with naming my new boat "Jack" again. So it goes with smaller ships in the space for me, one is destroyed, but most of them are mass-produced, so you just buy or possibly get new one on your base (Surely not so fast that you will be back in 5 mins tho), and add your own callsign to the new ship (the name).
Then of course bigger ships, cruiser class and up, they are not really mass produced, it takes months, or even years to build one, and as with sunken trans-ocean ships in our world, you will hardly name new ones after them. So, except for rare cases, I say it's juste HEAVY damage, loosing several parts (and few members of crew as well), dropping goods, ejecting core possibly, but not totall destructiin, just retreating to the base.
If you claim destruction of capital ship, the one who has gone kaboom should definitely change the name of the ship then (Xxxx to Xxxx II and such), to be really RP. Ah and ...yeah, when captain loses lifes of hunderth(s) crewman, along with very expensive ship, do you think his faction would let him fly the ship again? On in case on self-sponsors... No problem with so many deaths on your account? No problem with hunderths of millions you have to spend, even several times a day? Can someone be THAT rich... No I doubt it. So that's why claiming totall destruction of a capital isn't quite right.
Edited a bit.
I buy things I don't want to make an impression on people I don't like.
![[Image: Siggy-1.png]](http://01nothing.xf.cz/Siggy-1.png)