The best thing was when I was looking through the controls, and noticed an alternate item use control, and bound it to a key so I could try it, and went around trying it with different items on different things until I discovered that it took components out of ship systems (including hull), and the component corresponded to the tool used (the same as for repairing) - and that you could use it anywhere on any ship, without being flagged as an enemy. This was completely undocumented and unknown (as far as I was aware) at the time, but the first thing I did was tell everyone else (in the IRC channel anyways) in HazCom* about it because it was just hugely useful. (It was possible to fly a ship to a planet to make a new station, and pull a grav coil out of your ship to build your space station, for example, then pull another out to repair your ship, because the repair logic was such that it allowed repairing as long as the city had one of each required item of sufficient TL)
It was also useful to sabotage gravity drives, dropping stations or ships onto planets or into a sun - until Haxus locked it down, anyways. But since you had to float outside someone's engines and click hundreds or thousands of times to get every single grav coil in most ships, it wasn't really practical for anything more than small ships or stations (stations were easy, very few grav coils). Plus anyone who didn't put their grav units in their engine walls wasn't vulnerable to sabotage from outside, but not doing it made your ship less space and mass efficient.
You could also easily sabotage life support by taking parts out until it hit 0% (there being only a few life support units on a ship, and you being able to pull components from all of them from any one, this took very little time as long as you didn't get killed by troops). Sabotaging life support kept people from respawning in or berthing to that ship...
* HazCom, the "Hazeron Commonwealth" was an alliance of all the major empires at the time, which basically united the galaxy in peace until most left in a mass exodus.