EDIT: What I'm saying is, is it sort of like tweaking a table file?
Deffinitely not. If you wanted anything remotely like what you have in those images you would have to code it all in from scratch. You'd almost have to completely rip out of the existing code for the arcs and do it all over again, but far more complicated than it is now.
Hmm, I think I might see the major difference - is it that the new one is neither a single pixel wide line nor a string of polys? It doesn't have that nasty fracturing that stringing multiple rectangular textured polygons would give, yet it's not a single pixel thick anymore either.
Though I'd need to see it in motion to say for sure, it doesn't look quite right yet. A bit thick, sharp and one solid colour to be at it's full potential. Does it use a graphic to draw it or is it value based? Either way would mean just a small amount of tweaking to make it look awesome.
Previously, each section of each arc was a separate polygon. They were never truely connected in any way, they just happened to use the same basic points. It also was generally too big on smaller ships.
I changed it to use a quad strip instead. That makes it a solid poly rather than the separate stuff from before, and it also means that there won't ever be a gap in the arcs. I also changed it so that the width will vary between 0.2 (for small ships) and 0.6 (for larger ships) depeding on the radius of the ship. The width is x2 though, off of each side of each point. That makes sure that it doesn't end up too large in small fighters (like the pic in the first post shows). I originally set the width at 0.09 for smaller ships, and though that looks pretty good in the lab it doesn't look as good in-game. You just have to be too close to the ship in question to actually see the arcs, so I increased the size little by little until I found something that works better in-game, and that was 0.2.
I can change the size around though, quite easily. Making it smaller doesn't work all that well in-game, but it's easy enough to change the max size. And it is just a solid color and no textures are involved. It doesn't always look like it's a single color though, but that is just some byproduct of the effect/rendering rather than the color actually being different.
Oooh, and is this to be another feature of the ship lab? 
Hehe, I haven't decided actually. I did actually make all ships in the lab have damage arcs in the lab so that I could test it out easier, so the code is basically there to do such a thing. It's just not really a useful thing though, so I had never planned to leave that capability in place and was just going to rip it out after I got done testing. But I suppose I could be convinced to leave it in, if everyone really, really wants it.
