I recall boarding in SE. It was done almost the same way as in Empyrion; disable external weapons and thrusters, breach and clear the interior. The main differences are that Empyrion stops the disabled ship for you, has actual guys to fight instead of just rifle turrets, doesn't make you grind down containers to access them, and gives you decent salvaging tools instead of making you drag everything back home for Bob to grind down.
Sound like vanilla SE. It depends on the mods you are using - something else this lacks to a useful degree and at least Keen encourage you to reuse and repurpose their assets (and even provide them in raw form to re-edit) unlike this lot who just threaten you with legal action for even looking at them. We have crew to fight, only need to hack essential control stations to perform a take over. We have lots of option on how to approach the problem. Can reuse the captured vessel as its just a normal vessel even when its moving. We can grind it in place (with grinders or there is the nanite build system mod that can disassemble), take bits (complete assemblies of several blocks) off it and attach them to another ship if we want. Drag the whole thing back and reuse it or salvage it, take just parts back, just loot its cargo and blow it up, or whatever. In this I tend to only salvage a few valuable block off it and leave the rest as too much trouble. That of course assumes there is much of use left after the level of destruction you have to apply to get the damn thing to stop, fall to ground and become interactable. The biggest issue with SE is the amount of computing resources needed to run it decently especially if you start adding mods and programming block scripts.
Throw enough server hardware at it, you can enjoy playing SE with about two dozen people. I would guess with mild hyperbole that you can get at least five times as many Empyrion players in a much larger map for the same hardware.
Of course, though its less about number of player and more about what gets built/can be built. And lets face it, when the physics are so primitive that you are severely restricted in what you can do, than I guess it is no surprise. OTOH SE physics can be too much the other way and be really heavy on CPU and could do with some simplification, or at least a viable option for such. One day I would hope someone manages to hit the sweet spot in the middle
