About the Raven graphics: aren't there hints going back a ways that suggested they meant to update ship explosions at some point and maybe just never got it to work to their satisfaction? I think there was Empyrean Age wallpaper that had a Raven breaking up almost exactly like that one.
There are models of broken ships in the game files, but they aren't meant to be used outside of mission environments. What happened here is they took that broken Raven model and reattached it, then keyframed the pieces to fall off in the expected fashion. All the fire, smoke, sparks, and tiny bits and pieces would come from software like X-Particles or Particular. Then you just need to composite the pieces in After Effects, Nuke, or Composite.
It's also possible to create the whole thing in Maya, C4D, etc., but that's decidedly not how they're doing it and frankly might even take more time because the render time between iterations would be unnecessarily long. It's best practice to break things up into pieces. (See what I did there?)
