The way I make combat feel like the stakes are higher is by using a casualty system. If you’re having numbers of injured and dead crew reported every time you take a breach, it immediately becomes more desirable to stop taking damage.
Using NPC ship rules, you can destroy a players ship in 2 or 3 rounds depending on scale, without them really feeling the pain from the breaches (systems damage only really started to be a problem when you’re at the damaged level. Using npc rules, the ship would already be half destroyed for a single system to be damaged.)