Man. I didn't know such a suggestion would bring up so much heated debate. Personally, I'm on the no-extra-visible-guns-on-the-default-version side, but if they can be removed in PCS2 without leaving any notable discrepancies in the mesh (like a conspicuous space in the underlying model), then I've no objections. I do have another suggestion however, but it could be more of a can of worms... though less in terms of overt aesthetics. My suggestion comes down to visual effects, borrowing a technique that so far I've only seen used on the Boadicea... subsystem debris. When for example, a turret is destroyed on a normal ship, there's an explosion, some briefly rendered generic debris chunks that disappear almost immediately, and then you see the destroyed model of the turret (if one was included). Including subsystem debris means that visible chunks of the destroyed submodel will be spawned from the explosion that actually look like they used to be part of it, and they won't disappear after a second or two. The Boadicea used this so that chunks of the asteroid surface could be blown away. The only thing that might need some source code additions would be to give enough outward momentum to the debris, as on the Boadicea they don't fly away at any great pace. The drawbacks to using this (that I know of) are down to the number of polys... though a more informed modeler/coder might have more reasons to shoot down this suggestion.
