my ships are each different, all are compound shapes, one have 11 hull collision shapes, another 3… i want some precision in hull collision, nothing like ship being hit with projectile that can clearly pass between front and back wings. gimpact collision shape cannot handle collision events, so multiple hull shapes are only opinion
Have you thought about a radically different way?
Make each ship a static meshcollision shape in a seperate physicspace
then you can do all kind of tests with them there at barely any cost.
Eg translate bullets into local coords of the static shape, do test