You might be able to do metal. See products like metal earth. In my experience though that stuff is so flimsy and finicky it’s not worth fooling with. Laser cut wood is a good option but that is probably prohibitively expensive and might require glue.
A more realistic route for a reboot might be to ditch the buildable aspect entirely, and just have the ships molded in plastic and sold as “blind boxes”. There are a lot of popular collectible toys that use this route, some of them with games involved. Plastic toys are fairly durable and can be produced inexpensively, damage markers could be used instead of removable masts. I personally wouldn’t like this option for aesthetic reasons but I feel like this might be a way the game could be revived.