Newton 2.0 compound collision are a excellent way to simulate concave object shapes, and it works great for spaceships, the simulation is done in single precision newton world:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m25rkDDKhw0
This works great and fast for space simulation since most of the time AABB boxes are separated apart and when a rare and unfortunate collision event occurs the response works the way players would expect.
Ship sizes:
excalibur (the ship driven around): 16.84 units across bounding box
space station (DS9): 55.49 units
orange ship (hutet): 16.27 units
I used john ratcliff's approximate convex decomposition code to decompose the objects to convex hulls since currently there is no useful free alternative to his library
Each object there except the planet has 100 to 300 individual collision pieces in the compound collision to reprisent the shape of the object.
example closeup of a object compound collision (it's not perfect but it is as good as ratcliff's code can make it without manually slicing it up):