Well, i've come to a decision regarding fire hit.

Weapons are PULSE like and not PROJECTILE like. They're plain good old laser (don't know how i'm gonna call it int the game though) cannons which, conviniently for me, travel instantly so an accurate ray collision test is more than enough to check for hits.

Anyway, the collisions between 100 firing ships is not something i want inside the render loop. So i liten the check in the following way. ..

1. Thanks to Hypnotron & RaineC, wiki has a nice trick to detect vector angles .... this is used (sligtelly) modified to determine if the pointing vector of a ship/turret is hitting the BSphere of an object.

2. When a BOT is firing to another bot AND it's in firing range AND step 1 returns true, a hit is counted. It doesn't affect the rendering loop and it's tunnelling-proof. When the player is not invlolved in the firing, only a Bsphere check is performed.

3. When the player is involved (He fires or is fired upon) AND the check of step 2 returns TRUE then an accurate hit test is performed. The accurate ray hit test will tell if the player / bot is hit.

These tricks, hopefully, will limit the collision tests that must be done inside the render loop with TV.

PS: The laser beams are oriented using Zaknafeins excellent wiki tutorial of orientating a billboard around an arbitrary axis. Thanks Zak ..

PPS: Still haven't made up my mind about the laser texture to use. I'm thinking for a glittering Red/Green/Violet shader but i'm nowhere near such thing.