... after the number of ships that I've seen/heard of burning away in the past 2 days, I will try to explain nicely why this integrity system works, and what was implemented does not. I'm not saying that this exact proposal is the only way to go, but there are 3 key differences that should be considered:
1) Damage multiplication vs secondary explosions.
Secondary explosions create a chain reaction effect that further reduces integrity and triggers more explosions. Basically, once a system starts to "burn", there is no stopping it. This is a highly exploitable issue since a waffle of beams or cannons cause so much increased surface area that an attacker can just drop your shields, spray you with a few waffle beams and jump away. Then having done less than 3% damage, they've doomed your ship to a slow and unavoidable death.
This system suggested instead a more passive malice like bonus damage (which would have worked MUCH better with the structuralHP system), but alternatives could be performance degradation or "feed-back" damage to the reactorHP.
2) Low-end scaling.
This suggestion does not penalize small ships. Current build makes small ships all super fragile because they don't have the inner space to pad integrity.
3) Live updating damage to integrity.
If the point of integrity is to combat spaghetti building, and you want to do it without encouraging doom cubes, you need to NOT update integrity on damage. The reason is that now ppl have to make all systems cubes to be optimally durable... this is very boring and strongly drives design (ugly ones at that), but if people are allowed to build their ship up to being just shy of structurally unsound, then people can still do creative things like pack a nacel with thrusters and not have to worry about it catching fire more easily.
[edit] technically, if #3 is addressed, #1 should be fine