Let me just start this off with a general sense: If you're looking for truly comprehensive ship-to-ship combat rules that transform D&D as a game system, you will probably be disappointed.
Now, in fairness, I think WotC has tried to do vehicle combat in the past. We got rules for ships in Ghosts of Saltmarsh (though I think they tended more toward a kind of "long-term crew management system" than a real combat system. Descent into Avernus also gave us Infernal War Machines.
If I had to guess, my sense is that WotC felt the players weren't really engaging with those systems very much, and they figure most tables will want to mostly stick to the familiar systems of adventurer-to-monster combat.
Forge of the Artificer has chapters dedicated to both new Bastion facilities, including options for having a mobile bastion like a ship, Lightning Rail train, or Airship, and it also has some options for Elemental Airships.
Eberron is probably the closest to a Steampunk setting D&D has (though it's theoretically more Dieselpunk, as it's meant to feel like pulp novels from the 1930s, and, you know, also more the fantasy equivalent) and so naturally Airships are a big part of the setting's aesthetic.
We don't get a fully separate combat system for airship combat like one gets for, say, Starships in Starfinder or SW5E.
Instead, PCs are welcome to use their own class features to strike at foes on a ship, or the ship itself, or stations on the ships. Alternatively, you can use an action to operate a station.
Here, I think, lies the potential of a system like this, but I'll get to my potential hacks of this system to make it more robust later.
Every ship has a Helm station. By default, in Eberron, one must have the Dragonmark of House Lyrandar (a feat called Mark of the Storm) to operate it, though this is something you could easily waive in another setting or even have a non-Lyrandar ship in Eberron (which would probably not go over so well in a world where the house has a monopoly on air travel).
The pilot gets two additional actions: Drive and Shift Engine. The former moves the ship up to its speed in any direction, while the latter is, as I understand it, more or less starting or stopping the motor (like turning the keys in the ignition). You can even roll the airship, which forces everyone onboard to make a DC 15 Dex save or get flung off (though I'd assume if you were below decks, you'd just get knocked prone).
Each station has an AC and HP (as an object, it fails all saving throws, but also remember that a lot of spells only damage creatures). A station can also be disabled for 1 minute if hit with Dispel Magic.
Repairing a station, or the entire ship, uses the same rules as in the PHB for repairing a ship (20g and 1 day per 1 HP, which is pretty damn restrictive. It's halved if this is in a city or other location with lots of supplies and workers, but that's still going to take ages to repair).
However, with these elemental airships, you can also make emergency repairs on a station that has at least 1 HP. You need 100g of supplies to repair it and then, after an hour of work, make a DC 16 Sleight of Hand or Arcana check using Smith's Tools, Carpenter's Tools, or Tinker's Tools to restore 2d4+2 HP to it. If you fail, you can spend another hour using the same 100g of supplies to make the fix, but once HP is restored in this way, you can't do so again until you dock the ship.
I actually think that these emergency repairs are probably going to be the far more efficient way to fix it. For 5 times the cost and a 24th of the time, you can restore 7 times as much HP on average, and plenty of characters will have an easy time hitting that 16 DC (at level 1, an Artificer with the Arcana skill will probably have a +5 to the roll and advantage because of tool proficiency).
While you won't be able to do this again until the ship docks (kind of the vessel equivalent of a long rest) it's actually more efficient to take it out of the dock and run more emergency repairs. It is, however, still very expensive to do a pretty small repair to the ship.
Combat:
In combat, if someone's stationed at the helm, they can take an action to move or turn the engine on or off, but if they don't take an action, the ship keeps going in the direction it had been going at its speed (you can leave the station to bring the ship to a stop, and I'd assume you can also issue the Drive command to stop).
Creatures can move easily from one ship to another if the ships are within 5 feet of each other (you can, of course, ready an action to dash to do this if you want to pass by another ship but not remain within range).
Monsters can attack the ship itself, its crew stations, or creatures on the ship, and they'll understand if their damage isn't passing the ship's damage threshold.
Ship weapon stations will have a set attack bonus (+9 for a Lightning Turret on a Lyrandar Air Cruiser, for example) and standard ranged-weapon-style ranges, dealing a set amount of rolled damage, with an action to activate them.
Other stations also exist, like the Air Cruiser's Shield Station, which can be activated to first calibrate and then, as a second action, activate its shields, giving +5 AC to the ship and its stations and three-quarters cover to all creatures on its deck.
Airships:
There are only three airships presented in this chapter, the Lyrandar Air Cruiser, Lyrandar Skyskiff, and the Strider Airship. There are also some options for upgrading the ships by adding new crew stations, each of which cost large amounts of gold (in the thousands), but they have some interesting effects.
How I'd Hack This:
While my gut reaction is that this is slightly more interesting than Spelljammer's approach, I think there's more here that we could use.
The costs of buying and upgrading an airship are enormous, but on the other hand, this could give the players a real gold sink when they're in the mid-to-high levels and have more money than they know what to deal with (I don't think I've given my players any money since they were level 16 and there have been no complaints).
However, the problem with waiting so late to make this system even available to them is that by the time they have a cool airship, they might not need it, having teleportation spells or their own character abilities that make any kind of weapon station totally pointless.
Now, sure, they can have NPCs man those stations, but I think that defeats the whole fun of your party having a freaking airship!
So, here are some changes I'd make:
First, we make airships that are more or less intended for each tier of play, with their own set of stations that are of appropriate power.
Next, we have a player use their own abilities to determine the attack bonus on weapons (and otherwise use their abilities to determine how well they use their stations). We'd have physical weapons that use Dexterity (or even Strength), or magical ones that might use Int, Wis, or Cha.
Obviously, some non-weapon stations would also be good to have. We might have some kind of repair station (there is actually one of these that you can add to a ship in the book) that you might operate with Wisdom.
Now: how do we incentivize people using the stations? Do we just increase the damage? The aforementioned Lightning Turrets deal 4d10 damage on a hit, which for sure outpace a cantrip at, like, level 8, but there's a good chance you can do more with your action.
One option is that we just up the power - maybe 4d10 is a tier 1 turret, and that goes up to 8d10 at tier 2, etc. 16d10 is still something in tier 4.
However, I think there's another solution, and it's not a new one:
Make ship-to-ship damage separate from person-to-person damage, and then make it far harder to hit creatures with the weapons designed to hit ships.
First off, the ratio: you can cut the damage dealt by these weapons if you simply treat it like this: for anti-ship weapons, it's like you're doing 10 times as much. If a player hits a ship with Disintegrate that deals 75 damage, you treat that like you've done 7 damage. And if you hit an enemy creature with a weapon meant to hit a ship that deals 8 damage, that creature takes 80 damage.
However: you don't want these ship weapons to just be so much more powerful than anything a player could do, so you make it really hard for them to hit anything that isn't the size of an airship: I'd say you first say you can't add your proficiency bonus to attacks made against creatures. Next, you might also impose disadvantage. It's not impossible to land a hit like this, but it makes it much less likely that you'll get that insane blast off.
If you do use this system, though, you'll also want to rein in those damage numbers - not the 16d10 or whatever I said earlier, but more something like 2d8 or something.
I just wish we could get a book that really delved deep into a system that was relatively simple to implement but robust enough to feel like it's not just some faint gesture to the fantasy of ship-based combat. And that book is what the Spelljammer set should have been, but I guess we need to just get over that.
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