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[K-64]

Before I begin, I'll say that this is a purely cosmetic suggestion, and would likely have no to very little impact on actual gameplay (I hope!). An additional note is that I came across this idea due to admittedly entirely selfish reasons, being that creating a certain built-in weapon is proving to be more of a nightmare than I thought it would be.

The idea is this: Built in weapons could have an additional line detailing where in relation to the ship sprite itself it is, on the layer above or the layer below. That way the more elaborate, truly hull consuming weapons would be much, much more practical to make (see where my selfishness comes in yet? ). Like I said, this change would only be purely cosmetic, the weapon would still act identically to the others in terms of firing, projectiles and being damaged. An additional advantage of this method would be for icons of built-in ships having the potential to be even more complex and techno-babblish, with power cables and fancy doohickeys like that.

So yeah, by no means a high priority suggestion or anything like that, just a "That would be nice" feature

[GUNINANRUNIN]

Hmm…. 

[xenoargh]

Well... you can make the built-in weapon use the HIDDEN value.

[K-64]

That wouldn't solve the problem in any way for animated weapons

[xenoargh]

Ah, so you want an animated weapon that can render under the ship sprite and do some fancy animations.  Like, say, a giant crablike character with the "claws" able to open and shut while their cannons animate, etc., which would be pretty awesome.

That goes into the same category as my turrets-on-turrets idea and underslung weapons in general; it's a pretty un-trivial change to rendering order; underslung weapons would have to get queued first, then ships, then regular turret bases, turrets, glows and so forth.  

Technically, I don't see any major issues making it happen, other than it being a lot of work, but I don't know anything about how the engine's handling that kind of queue.  

There are issues of pop-in as well, if ships started having huge, elaborately-animated built-ins; probably that can be solved by rendering any ship that passes a distance check for 1.5 view distance from the center - radius and then just requiring modders to use bigger radii if they want to avoid issues.  I presume the engine's doing something like that already, so it's probably not a big deal to add that part, or even having a view radius variable per ship.