In the early days of when Bob added the dammage decal system (not the first time, but when the current system was added), I was discussing ideas with him about how to do decals for beams and other heavy weapons. I thought that beams should be able to pierce the outer hull and cause melting of the dammaged section. I had an idea, where each ship would have a special dammage glowmap (perhaps animated), that would be rendered behind the main map. Whenever the ship was hit by a heavy weapon, it would apply a large dammage decal, but the center of that would be an alpha map, and reveal the section of the dammaged glowmap beneath. The problems with beam dammage decals, is how to display dammage for type 1 beams, or glancing hits from other times, where the hit point isn't one, but a series of impact points along a path. Since the frequency of beam hits differs depending on the speed of the machine (and the strain its undergoing at the time), a type 1 (slash) hit would look like a varying number of single hits in a line along the hull, rather than the swath of destruction we'd want to see. There'd need to be a special method of calculating the path of the hit, rather than the individual beam hits of one volley.
