going down the route of advanced fire arcs a big deal, and I mean a really big deal. The problem is how do you handle vessels that have varying geometries? do you specify per weapon point? or do you allow a certian number of defined banks that weapons are assigned to? do you allow non symetrical arcs in alt-azimuth?
and then once you do all that have fun making an efficient weapon targetting algorithm that allows a lot of ships... 
not to say it isn't doable, but just being able to set the arcs makes it necessary to open up the discussion about weapon assignment to hardpoints and how the AI groups and selects targets since you are no longer using the same quadrants for each vessel.
my personal opinion is that weapon points in the mesh file can be referenced in the entity file (and that individual weapon points can be reused by multiple weapons if desired) the weapon definition selects a defined weapon class (range efects, sounds, defined elsewhere) and specifies the alt azimuth -/+ limits for that hardpoint (based on the normal rotation) and then has a user defined bankID to reference for abilities or research (upgrade all weapons in bank0) This allows each weapon to be tweaked to properly fire from the hardpoint normal, and also allows a set of weapons to use a generic template.
the weapon class would have a targetclass priority list as well as the ability to specify a turret mesh (rotation speeds, reocil, number of barrels) and relevent parameters for all normal weapon damage, range, cooldown, sfx and effects
example:
addWeapon(<bankgroupname> XXXX, <hardpointname> XXXX,<weaponClass> XXXX,<minAlt> -35,<maxAlt> 45,<minAzm> -20,<maxAzm> 45)
to make this work the vessel would also need an overall targetclass priority list so that the ships primary and secondary targets would be enumerated and other weapons would fire on targets of opppertunity for thier best effect.
now make this run for 1000 ships at a time, with per projectile hit detection and user defined shield layering and effects and you'd have me
