An extremely silly question, buut...

[Pit Bull]

Well, if you have an abandon ship option then perhaps it would be good to have life capsules on your ships.

So, if you choose to abandon ship pre destruction the capsules contain your crew (i.e. the experience factor). You could then have a time period to pick them up with another ship, or a certain chance each turn that they expire or some such.

If you pick them up before they die, you could have some of the unhappiness factor, associated with ship loss, offset.

If the enemy pick them up, they could be held prisoner and traded.

Or you could use intelligence operatives to rescue them, raising your sides happiness.

Once picked or rescued, they could reappear at a central holding pool, the surviving crew could be available for reassignment to a newly contructed ship. You could pre-stock the pool by training crew in your military academies.

Perhaps you'd track the type of ship the crew came from, and if assigned to a different type there would be penalties for non type familiarity.
i.e. so you couldn't put an experienced frigate crew onto a dreadnought without loosing most of their experience.

I realise that would all require major coding changes, I'm just rambling.....

Pit Bull