There is the opportunity to make facing an unknown shipping pretty uncommon by researching engineers, who can tell you about pretty much every ship, and Dioxine did a good job of telling you what each shipping is about in its ufopaedia entry, including the damage per minute (DPM). I like the fact that there is some experimentation too - is it safe to intercept, and what eventually brings it down? With exception of the heavier military ships, nothing one-shots even the Hunter-Killer, so if you're not jumping in on aggressive, testing the enemy's range and power isn't too hard.
I think the skull rating would discourage this experimentation and risk-taking - oops, too many skulls for me, abort. What I think would be more useful is having more feedback on how much damage is being done to the target, something like the smoke clouds on UFOs in EU2012 as you damage them, or maybe let damage decrease the geoscape speed of the target. Unfortunately those would require source code modifications. Maybe a modification to the text displayed below the interception window could help, in the same vein as the battlescape hit indicator Meridian added; instead of just "hit," it could display "bounced off!" (no damage because armor), "glancing hit!" (damage below a certain threshold, like percent of target's total), and "solid impact!" for a good hit. Or at a certain percent of total damage to the enemy, a message about them smoking, maybe make it dithered a bit by a random amount so it isn't the exact same percentage every time.
Edit: Modifying the displayed text should be simple enough to code that I can take a look at it and come up with a prototype.
