Interesting note regarding Self-Destruct
 

Just noticed this a few minutes ago, self-destruct when used as a boarding counter-measure, will not always destroy the ship/base. To add a little variety I modded some AIs to use armor instead of shields. Anyway, I sent a boarding ship to try and take a base orbiting a planet I recently 'aquired' and failed to notice it had a self-destruct device. I boarded, it went boom, but didn't 'die', it did however, take 10,000 damage to it's armor.

Fairly conclusive proof that self-destruct does 10,000 damage. So if you *really* want to capture an enemies ship/base, armor your boarding ship so that it has (more than) 10,000kt worth of armoring.