The user's observation was right twice over: cockpit elements can't float
disconnected, and the missing punch geometry is STRUCTURE, not glass. The
TRICODER.H decode (dpl_Punchize tokens = {dmg_set, undmg2enbl|texture,
dmg_clear}) shows PUNCH marks geometry for the board's per-triangle DAMAGE
machinery -- battle damage punches holes through it; undamaged it renders
opaque.
The per-mesh discriminator: every *_cop PUNCH patch contains exactly one pair
of BYTE-IDENTICAL duplicate PMESHes -- solid damage-state cover plates, not
visible undamaged structure. Rendering them was the "solid black canopy";
dropping whole punch patches left the floating fragments. The loader now
hides just the within-patch duplicate pairs (FNV hash over the raw pmesh
chunk; BLX duplicates its main lattice ACROSS patches, so cross-patch copies
stay) and renders the rest of the punch lattice opaque, DOUBLE-sided (the old
single-siding + per-face inward winding existed only to fight the plates'
black box; with the plates hidden it was moot and its centroid heuristic was
fragile on the tight canopies -- removed). BT_COP_PLATES=1 shows the plates,
BT_COP_SINGLE=1 restores single-siding (diag).
In-game on pure defaults: madcat dome + connected framed cockpits with window
apertures on bhk1 / owens / sunder / vulture / avatar. Residual: thor + loki
still show an oversized central block vs the offline authored-eye prediction
-- under investigation.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
