Fuel tests are interesting, there is an idea on the forum from Lord Tareq that uses speedboost to take a ship with a base speed of whatever (say 0.100000) to lets say 200.000000 (or whatever you want actually) in game without the speedboost the ships barely move, as if they were completely drained of fuel and were dead in space. When you apply the speedboost, (which wonderfully applies to all ships in a given radius, i believe its 5000, but you again can reset this value to any value you feel is appropriate). Once activated the speedboost kicks in the new speed for all ships in radius and they have what appears to be normal speed. (or more if that is what you want).
Once the time limit is up (this can be set in the ability/buff as well for however long you want. 180 seconds is three minutes of course. I set it for 900 or 15 minutes. the cooldown you can set for as long as you like as well.
Only thing i noticed is that it creates an atmosphere where you are need to watch your ships alot. If you like micro-ing your fleet then no big deal. Also for the test only one race had this, the advent. All the others were at normal speed, so it gave them an edge in combat, becuase i had one more thing i had to watch.
If however you were to set this for all the other races as well, (you would need to adjust all the other ships speeds as well, then add the speedboost ability to whatever ship in that races fleet you want) in the test the ability was in the colonyship.
Anyway, the Fuel Tests are workable.
The Ammo tests i tried were not as successful. I could not find a way to run out of ammo, short of disabling them. And the only way i have found to re-enable is to have the dis-able on a timer. I could not get a second ability to replace the first. Anyway, there are some smart people modding here, and the Devs rule everything, so fi the modders cant figure it out, and sometimes i've noticed that it sometimes takes a backward view of things to get a problem resolved, haha, well, perhaps that is how computers think. 
But if the modders cant get it, it would be just a matter of the Devs changing something a modder can't get their fingers around to tweak if they feel it benefits the community.
IC is very mod conscious and very very community oriented, good people, we may get something like this if enough people can convince them its worth while.
Take care and keep modding!!!
-Teal
